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THE PLACE OF JESUS 

IN THE 

LIFE OF TODAY 

A Series of Unconventional Talks on 

Some Present Day Realities 

of the Christian Religion 



By HENRY KINGMAN 

Author of "Building on Rock," "Way of Honor," and 
"The Faith of a Middle-Aged Man" 




ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York: 347 Madison Avenue 
1922 



i 






^' X<^* 



Copyright, 1922, by 

The International Committee of 

Young Men's Christian Associations 

Printed in the United States of America 



AUG 15 72 

©Ci.A681405 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

Henry Kingman, A Biographical Sketch . . vii 

A Gospel for Today i 

The Bringer of Love 8 

The Leader of Righteousness 34 

As Arbiter of Debated Things 51 

The Bringer of the Kingdom 67 

Jesus as an Outstretched Hand 84 



PREFACE 

Old religions, stranded here and there among the obliv- 
ious years, are a common sight. Names of divinities 
that once shook the world have now to be looked up in 
books of reference. Clever writers tell us that the reli- 
gion of Jesus is already laboring among the shallows, and 
will soon be hard aground, never again to move under its 
own power. 

We believe, on the contrary, that the Christian faith 
pulsates with the power and wonder and beauty of the 
God of Life, and that the personality of Jesus is — to 
human experience^ — the living center of its glory. All 
that is sweetest and best in human life still finds its source 
in Him. 

These papers are written to give expression to this con- 
viction, that is as sunshine to the soul. They are not so 
much an argument as a testimony. Obviously they are 
not for the scholars or theologians, but for the ordinary 
people who have to live and suffer without much comfort 
of philosophy or mystical experience. They are the wit- 
ness of one who^ — though plagued with doubt and some- 
what beaten on by disappointment — has yet found life 
more and more taking on the cast of gratitude to Jesus 
Christ for the difference He has made. 



HENRY KINGMAN 

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

By George Irving 

While Henry Kingman does not need any written 
memorial a full life of him should be prepared. All too 
few records are made of lives v^hose talents and oppor- 
tunities, v^hile above the average, are yet not so far in 
advance of the rank and file of us as to discourage any 
possibilities of emulation. 

There is at least one other good reason why such a 
life should be written which will appear more fully 
I hope as this sketch proceeds. Henry Kingman was a 
hero. He was victorious in one of the very fiercest fights 
ever waged by a mortal. 

Henry Kingman was born in Boston, in 1863. He 
died in Claremont, Gal., April 15, 192 1. He was born 
into a home of substantial comfort and thorough culture 
• — facts which left their mark on all his days, for Henry 
Kingman is more frequently described by those who knew 
him best as *'God's Gentleman'' than by any other term. 

In 1880 he entered Colby College, Maine, which he 
chose because of his father's friendship for the president, 
Dr. Henry B. Robins. Dean Shailer Mathews, a class- 
mate of Kingman's in Colby and a warm personal friend 
to the end of his life, says of his college days : "Henry 
Kingman came from a family with traditions. His grand- 
father was Dr. Rufus Anderson, for many years Secre- 
tary of the American Board, and his father was a mer- 

vii 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

chant of standing in Boston. He brought to the college 
a natural sense of superiority — a quality justified by his 
natural abilities as well as social standing. He never 
went into athletics in any prominent way, but was among 
the first to organize tennis, then a new game and quite 
unknown in our little college town. But he was a 
prodigious walker and would tire the best of us. 

''His vitality was exuberant. I do not remember ever 
knowing a young man who seemed so radiant with health 
and animal spirits. I recall that once he persuaded some 
of the little group to which we both belonged to sleep 
out one rainy night. I was too cautious to follow his 
lead, but the campus for days abounded in stories of 
how the irrepressible youth slept in a tree after having 
failed to find protection in a camp on a rainy night.'' 

This reference to his exuberant vitality makes illumin- 
ating reading for the friends of the last twenty years of 
Henry Kingman's life, when he carried with him a body 
beset by what to many another good man would have 
been overpowering weakness. How little the college 
students whom he delighted to watch in their games and 
contests realized that, even though now in critical health, 
he was a few short years before the equal of any of 
them in the oft-quoted "pep" to which they gave such a 
high regard. Often have I seen a quizzical smile pass 
over the face of ''the Bishop," as several of his inti- 
mates affectionately called him, when some boisterous 
young physical Samson would dilate on the absolute 
necessity of perfect health as a basis of any sort of suc- 
cess in life. 

His college course during which he was, in the opinion 
of a well known classmate, ''on the whole the most po- 
tent influence for good in the college," was followed by 

viii 



HENRY KINGMAN 

three years of study in Hartford Theological Seminary. 
Here his exuberant spirit continued. A college mate says 
he was at the bottom of most of the pranks at the Semin- 
ary. During his college course he spent one summer 
vacation as a home missionary in Michigan among the 
copper mines. "His letters/' writes a friend of those 
and later days, "were a characteristic exposition of both 
sides of his nature. He was ready to work with the 
spirit of a martyr but he missed the joyous life he lived 
when among people of culture and wealth." 

In 1886 he went to North China as a missionary of the 
American Board. His decision to become a foreign mis- 
sionary was made, I believe, because it was for him "the 
way of honor." No man could have possessed and en- 
joyed more the rich associations and unmistakable oppor- 
tunities that were his among his own people. He elected 
to go to China because he saw there a difficult field that 
unmistakably called for workers. For ten years he threw 
himself into that service. One who was in a position to 
observe his work says that "he soon came to the front 
as one of the most trusted and influential workers." 
Early in his Chinese career he married Miss Annie Lees, 
daughter of a distinguished missionary of the London 
Mission Society and the union was a perfect one in 
every respect. Of the three children from this mar- 
riage who grew to maturity, tv/o are today missionaries 
in China. Could any commentary on the life of parents 
be stronger than this living witness to their unselfish de- 
votion to the cause of their Lord? 

On being invalided home from China, Kingman spent 
some time in Southern California, and while still a very 
sick man, was called to the pastorate of the Congrega- 
tional Church in Claremont, California. This church, 
which is the only one of any character in the home of 

ix 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Pomona College, is unique in many respects. Usually 
over a score of different denominations are represented 
in its active membership. As a rule there have been 
during the last fifteen years over twenty-five retired 
clergymen and furloughed missionaries in the congrega- 
tion. In addition the faculty of Pomona College, with 
hundreds of its students, regularly worshipped in this 
church. This was an audience to draw the very best 
out of any man. To Henry Kingman with a mind tem- 
pered and sharpened like a Damascus blade it came as a 
ringing challenge. One who was an officer of the church 
during many years of Dr. Kingman's pastorate makes 
this true characterization of his preaching : "To the viril- 
ity of his thought, the logic of which was inescapable, 
were added charm and briUiance of diction of unfaiHng 
attractiveness. Apart from their moral and spiritual 
appeal, his sermons were models of English — not the 
studied productions of a mere master of rhetoric, but 
the natural outgoings of a mind of rare genius.'' 

He had himself passed through periods when his faith 
was tested as by fire. He was so made that he must ever 
seek the fullest light possible on any subject under con- 
sideration. His brilliant, well-trained mind delighted in 
his stimulating audience. Occasionally it would seem 
as though he had himself gone so far beyond the experi- 
ence of most of his hearers that they could not fully fol- 
low him, but his perfect diction, his capacity to express 
his ideas with a clarity and a nicety which was the de- 
spair of fellow preachers, his unfailing good taste in apt 
quotation and illustration, carried the interest of his 
hearers on the rare occasions when they could not keep 
abreast of him in his spiritual journey. Almost always 
he read his sermons, but so splendidly did he master the 



HENRY KINGMAN 

art of pulpit reading it never hampered his freest de- 
livery. 

While Henry Kingman scorned "to play safe" in theol- 
ogy or in anything else, he was ahke impatient of those 
on the one hand who think they have achieved a static 
faith and on the other those who are ever '^proving all 
things'' and never holding fast to that which is good. He 
was profoundly indignant with any one who would lead 
young people into academic bogs and towards intellectual 
will-o'-the-wisps. 

The life of a small college town while abnormal is 
vividly interesting. In matters of religion it is much like 
living in the measles ward of a contagious hospital. Al- 
ways the students are the same age and perennially are 
they breaking out with first one mental disturbance and 
another. To many, naturally and properly, continuous 
questions come concerning their religious faith. Others 
have heard that ^'College men and women are haunted 
by doubts" and forthwith proceed to be so ''haunted." 
With each group this Christian scholar was sympathetic, 
patient, and eager to be helpful. 

One who had close intellectual and spiritual fellow- 
ship with him writes discriminately : *'To his fingertips, 
Dr. Kingman was a modern in his thinking. He kept 
abreast of the world's best literature; and was a keen 
observer of the great world movements. His judgment- 
values of men, of books and things were greatly prized 
by his friends. In his theology he was a progressive; 
but he was too wise and careful a thinker to discard the 
garnered treasures of the past. While an evangelical 
in spirit he was often sorely baffled concerning the com- 
monly accepted formulas of the evangelical faith; and 
clung to the Cross while perplexed regarding some of its 

xi 



^A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

orthodox interpretations. His faith was implicit rather 
than explicit. His charming little book, 'Building on 
Rock/ is an epitome of his religion. Its very title sug- 
gests that there were certain things of which he felt sure; 
and in which he found a final resting place for the soul." 

More than any but a few of those whom I have ever 
met, Henry Kingman delighted in the refinements of life. 
He was one of the fortunate ones who could maintain a 
proper balance in his appreciation of the material and 
spiritual gifts. A classmate has pointed out that in col- 
lege he was known, especially at first, as aloof. That 
quality followed him to the end of life. This was in- 
tensified by his physical limitations. Longing for com- 
radeship and friendly relationship he was never able to 
be hail fellow. Those who were so fortunate as to get be- 
hind his involuntarily raised barrier of shy reserve found 
a large, rich, full comradeship that is rarely if ever 
equalled and never surpassed in human friendship. In 
spite of and sometimes because of this reserve, hundreds 
of students, now scattered to the ends of the earth, came 
into helpful relation to this great heart in a frail body. 
President Blaisdell of Pomona College, of which our 
friend was a trustee and unfailing supporter, has writ- 
ten : "I have never known a man whose mere presence, 
shut into a sick room, dominated a community as did the 
spirit of Henry Kingman." 

With this demand for sincerity, there was coupled 
an almost terrifying power of sarcasm. Sad indeed was 
the plight of the luckless one against whom it was di- 
rected. His satire never burned without a good reason 
and then rarely. As one of his warmest friends, Rev. 
James M. Campbell, has written, ''His power of sarcasm 
and invective was something 'uncanny,' but with the pass- 

xii 



HENRY KINGMAN 

ing years his spirit grew sweeter and mellower, and he had 
but little use for these dangerous weapons. His eyes 
could flash with fire, but the prevailing expression was 
that of gentleness and tenderness. His smile was a 
caress. He was just the kind of man to whom one can 
instinctively turn for sympathy when in trouble and for 
advice when in perplexity.'' Never have I known any 
man who was more consistently impatient of all that 
bordered on sham and humbug. 

In 1908 the church, having grown greatly in size and 
demands on the pastor, decided to call an assistant. By 
an interesting series of Providences I was led to that 
post in November of that year. In all the range of reli- 
gious work it is doubtful if any other relationship gives 
such an opportunity to test the real quality of men. For 
almost five years we worked together with perfect sym- 
pathy and growing understanding. In this relationship 
how often did I see demonstrated Kingman's fine concep- 
tion of honor and steel-true loyalty to a friend and col- 
league. With his own meager strength constantly drain- 
ing away he might have been excused if at times he be- 
came impatient of those whose physical vigor was con- 
stantly increasing. But no such feeling ever existed. He 
was ever the soul of generosity. Probably there is no way 
in which a true man can be detected more quickly than 
by his relation to those associated with him in junior po- 
sitions. A truly big man is ever eager to see that those 
about him receive more than their own share of the 
credit for anything that is done. By this standard Henry 
Kingman's life was absolutely faultless. He was, in the 
phrase which was often on his lips, *'a true Christian 
knight." 

Harry Emerson Fosdick, who visited the college after 
illness had nearly finished its work with the body of our 

xiii 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

friend, has this to say about him : ''Dr. Kingman was one 
of the most gracious, Christian gentlemen whom I have 
ever met, combining dehcacy with power, spiritual in- 
sight with moral courage in an unusual way. George 
Eliot says somewhere that some people are like a quota- 
tion from the Bible in the midst of a newspaper para- 
graph. I think of Dr. Kingman as deserving to have this 
said about him. Delightfully human and simple in his 
friendliness, there always was a height about his spirit 
and a purity about his insights that made one feel that 
he must be living signally close to the Eternal Spirit." 

The Reverend James M. Campbell, whom I have al- 
ready quoted, writes further with restraint and insight 
about some of the qualities of his friend: 

"Perhaps the most outstanding quality in his character 
was his indomitable courage. A braver soul I never 
knew. He was a true knight-errant of the Cross. Of a 
certain Greek poet it was said that he wrote of the sub- 
lime and was himself the sublime of which he wrote. 
Our friend wrote of the heroic and was himself the 
heroic of which he wrote. His sermons were autobi- 
ographical. They rang with the note of victory. He 
himself lived on the victorious side of life, triumphing 
over bodily weakness and pain, concealing his own suf- 
fering, and entering into sympathy with the troubles 
and sufferings of others, as if he had none of his own." 

Nothing could more completely reveal the true life of 
this radiant^ heroic, chivalric spirit than the following 
comments on and notations from his letters and diary 
furnished by his son, Harry L. Kingman, now a mission- 
ary in China, who as a college undergraduate won his 
letter in every field of athletics and became nationally 
known as a base-ball player. 

xiv 



HENRY KINGMAN 

''He kept up his courage and happiness and love in 
spite of great bodily weakness. His diary shows that he 
sometimes suffered great secret depression because of his 
ever-increasing asthma but he concealed it. In March 
1920 he wrote in the diary which he kept for over thirty 
years : 'Dreadful month of asthma. Cannot see way out.' 
Dec. 3 — 'Very great shrinking from being sick again/ 
Dec. 10 — 'Unprecedented night of sweet sleep.' A week 
before he died, his sister-in-law said to him, 'Henry, I 
suppose you will just go on playing the game and putting 
up a brave fight' 'What else is there to do?' he said 
with his sweet, wistful smile. He often visited sick peo- 
ple when very miserable himself. April 28, 1920, he 
wrote in his diary^ — 'Wish I could do something of use.' 
Two days before death he wrote in scarcely legible hand, 
'In shadow of death from i a. m. Doctor thought I 
could not rally.' It seemed as though he was chuckling 
in his weakness at again having slipped out of death's 
fingers as he had done so many times before. He was 
always joking whimsically about his weakness. A year 
ago he took charge of the church for a few weeks in the 
summer. He wrote me, 'And now I am in charge for a 
few weeks and am putting up a bluff at being a live wire. 
Mother and I are calling on new families and I am adver- 
tised to preach five times in the next four weeks. It will 
be a great joy if only my strength is equal to it. It hasn't 
been for six weeks past, but the fine weather ought to 
make a difference. The trouble is almost more with the 
thinking than the actual preaching, as on so many days I 
am like a mud-turtle for lack of quiet sleep, and it is 
hard to read a thoughtful book. Mending stockings has 
been nearer my size intellectually. I am polishing up the 
auto, one morsel at a time — an eye today, an ear tomor- 

XV 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

row, the back of the neck or a hand the day after, and so 
on until by the eye of faith I can see a clean car in the 
near future.' 

*'He was a good sport and understood us in a way that 
helped greatly. He wrote me recently 'It is fine that you 
can keep up your athletic practice. It is a splendid cor- 
rective for too much introspection, and should give you 
the fresh personal contacts that are so necessary to keep 
a man wholesome and natural. One simply can't get too 
much sunshine in his spirit, so long as it doesn't bleach 
out his stern, strenuous obedience to the call of duty; 
and I hope you'll never have less enjoyment of the good 
things of life than you have today.' 

**Many entries in his diary show his worldwide sympa- 
thy. He suffered when there was famine in China or 
plague in India. He was almost too sympathetic and 
patient in the weaknesses and shortcomings of his chil- 
dren for their own good. 

''He was the soul of honor. Whether it had to do 
with large sums of money or only the question of using 
some one else's commutation ticket there was no wavering 
or hesitating as to which way he should go. The Way 
of Honor was the only way that he knew. Of speaking 
in public he wrote me 'One must be above all else honest 
and sincere. Don't let enthusiasm or zeal lead you to 
exaggerate or over-color. Prune your best passages se- 
verely, so that men won't feel you are putting it on thick, 
but that you have reserves of truth behind.' 

"In China he translated in two years a much needed 
'Harmony of the Gospels,' but it was destroyed in the 
Boxer uprising before anyone had seen it. He never 
bewailed the loss. I hadn't even heard of it until recently. 
Mother told me last week that as a young man he was a 

xvi 



HENRY KINGMAN 

fine swimmer. He must have known that it would have 
impressed me greatly had he told me, as I aways rever- 
enced any sort of physical prowess, but never did he 
mention it. He was so widely read that at home he 
might well have spoken autocratically, and have imposed 
his beliefs and ideas on his children, but he did not do 
so. Just after his book 'Building on Rock' was published 
he wrote me, 'It was a real comfort to read your words of 
appreciation of the little book, because I was not sure 
whether the work was worth the doing. Over and over 
again I was inclined to give it up because it seemed so 
dull and commonplace — and yours was the first judgment 
about it that has reached me. So I thanked God and 
took courage. It is not easy to satisfy myself now, and 
whatever I do is done at the expense of an inordinate 
amount of labor. Fortunately that doesn't matter much, 
because I have time enough and more.' 

"'He had unhmited faith in God and also in man. 
Dr. Stoughton, who attended him in his last illness, said 
father's deathbed was unique in his experience, in its joy 
and faith and hope. Of his last summer's sermons he 
wrote: 'I am afraid that I never get out of the rut of a 
single topic in these days, and that all my talks are merely 
variations upon one theme. But people never seem to get 
tired of listening, and it occupies my thought so largely to 
the exclusion of other things that I make no effort at 
originality. The miracle of God's love in our poor fail- 
ing lives is a wonder of which people never tire of hear- 
ing.' In another letter he wrote me, 'There is not the 
slightest question in my mind that^ — however one may ac- 
count for it^ — the greatest joy and the greatest efficiency in 
life are found in a close alliance with Jesus Christ All 
sorts of things puzzle me and perhaps grow nebulous 

xvii 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

with years, but of this central fact of experience I have 
no doubt — the mercy of God comes to one through faith 
in Jesus and in His message. And don't be at all con- 
cerned at the inevitable fluctuations in your own respon- 
siveness to this truth — its reality and fruitfulness are 
happily independent of our changing physical conditions/ 
*'A short time ago he wrote me, ' You ask how I would 
express my theory of Father and Son. I would never 
try. Any time this last twenty years I should have been 
so sensible of being quite beyond my depth, that I should 
avoid discussing the question if possible. When one asks 
if Jesus was of the same eternal substance as the Father 
^ — if he was God in that sense — I realize that I don't know 
what I am talking about. I can only affirm that Jesus 
and His friends all agreed in affirming about Him — that 
He was the God-man — that "God was in Him, reconciling 
the world to Himself" — that He and the Father were one 
— that He was the perfect expression and revelation of 
God — that when we find Him we find God — that He has 
the 'Value of God" for us. But not one nor all of these 
affirmations seems to me to declare or explain His met- 
aphysical relation with God. I shrink from calling Him 
^'God" even as He never called Himself by that name; 
Master and Lord seem to satisfy me; the other term I 
reserve for clearness sake, for the Eternal and Almighty. 
But, there as soon as I begin discussing it I fall into 
difficulties. I rest in the fact that I find God in Him and 
through Him, and that He came to bring men to God. 
I feel sure that any doctrine that men have fought over 
so fiercely for centuries, never able to understand it or 
explain themselves to others of differing views, and one 
where even the necessary terminology of discussion re- 
quires a keen and highly trained mind to grasp the thought, 

xviii 



HENRY KINGMAN 

can never be of the essentials of faith and religion. A 
little child can smile back at Jesus, with an eternal sub- 
mission of His will to the God who expresses Himself in 
Him. But the Trinity! I merely lose myself helplessly 
and painfully in the effort to grasp its content.' " 

In spite of increasing physical weakness Henry King- 
man lived vividly and gladly to the very end. On the 
morning he died, just before the end came, he returned 
to consciousness to find Mrs. Kingman weeping by his 
bedside. On asking her why she was weeping she re- 
plied that she could not let him go. *'Is that what it is ?" 
he asked. In reply to the unarticulated affirmative, 
with the smile that was so characteristic of his whole life, 
he replied, "Then it is inexpressibly beautiful." With 
these brave words, so characteristic of him, upon his lips 
this triumphant warrior of the Lord Jesus Christ laid 
down his sword at his Master's feet. Like that other 
radiant spirit who had much the same physical burden to 
carry he could have said, "Gladly I have lived and gladly 
I'll die, and I lay me down with a will." In one of his 
last published sermons, delivered only a few months be- 
fore his death, in speaking on the text "One thing I do, 
I press forward," he quotes a couplet which is truly auto- 
biographic : 

"The handles of my plow are wet 
The shares with rust are spoiled 
And yet, and yet my God, my God 
Keep me from turning back." 

God answered his prayer. 

xix 



Chapter I 
A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 

A thoughtful man today — whether in Wall Street or on 
the Arabian desert — cannot long be forgetful of the prob- 
lems of God and life. Interest in them are a part of his 
manhood. And if he is honest as well as thoughtful, he 
does not want to get away from them, because his highest 
welfare seems somehow to be bound up with their solu- 
tion. From tim^ to time, in moments of unwonted spir- 
itual attention and discernment, the consciousness of God 
wells up in^him as from some unplumbed depth of real- 
ity in his own being, and troubles him with questions he 
cannot answer. What does it all mean? What is the 
relation of this tantalizing, incomplete human life to the 
illimitable life of God? How near can He come to us 
across the unbridged unseen? Can our weakness draw 
in any way upon His strength, or our troubles find com- 
fort in His help? 

Questions such as these, that may have been curiously 
indifferent to us once, press in upon us with hungry in- 
sistence as years go by and we are made to feel how 
slight our hold upon earth's sunshine is. And never does 
such a question thrust itself on our attention but we are 
brought, whether we will or no, face to face with the per- 
sonality of Jesus Christ. What He once said and did 
and v/as has taken such hold on the thought and con- 
science of mankind, that we cannot think of God^ or of 



2 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

the way in which His life may touch our lives, without 
thinking in terms of Jesus' experience and teaching. The 
clarity of His insight in these matters so far outruns any- 
thing else of which we have any knowledge in the world 
of religious literature, that it cannot honestly be ignored, 
if we are to think of them at all. 

And so it happens that the association of Jesus with 
the life of today is as inevitable as the human hunger for 
some knowledge of the unfathomable abysses of life and 
death that hem us in. Sooner or later, out of our depth 
or need, we cry out for light, for understanding — and 
there stands this Jesus^ of ancient Nazareth, professing 
to offer just the knowledge that we want. What are we 
to make of Him ? What are we, who are caught so help- 
lessly in the intellectual currents of the twentieth century, 
to do with this Teacher of the first century in Asia? 
Half of our present-day literature, we may say, seems to 
ignore Him as constituting any factor in the thinking of 
our time. And yet He makes profound appeal to all in 
us that is most divine. What place has He among the 
forces that are actually moulding society today? 

It is easy to give to questions' such as these conventional 
answers out of the past, such as once seemed to settle 
the matter with authority and to silence discussion. 

But in point of fact the familiar answer of authority 
simply does not engage the interest of the young people 
of this generation. It does not meet them intellectually 
where they are — it fails of their respect as well as of their 
sympathy, as though it were an evasion of honest inquiry. 
This is true whether we think of the young men and 
women in our colleges, or of such a vast and representa- 
tive gathering of the average men of today as was assem- 



A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 3 

bled in camps and trenches during the war. No official 
pronouncement out of the distant past, whether from an 
infallible church or an infallible book, can any longer be 
relied upon to make friendly connection with the modern 
point of view, or satisfy the critical search for truth that 
has become the intellectual habit of our generation, and 
that — critical and unsparing though it be — is nowhere 
more fittingly employed than in seeking for the greatest 
truth of all. 

When we set ourselves to think who Jesus was, and 
what He is to the present-day society, we may — ^because 
of early training and unshakable convictions — ^be quite 
content with an interpretation of His person and message, 
couched in forms and habits of thought belonging to an 
age so remote and unfamiliar as to have passed altogether 
out of the understanding of the common people of our 
Western world. To us it may be all living and significant, 
inexpressibly dear and sacred, also, through its associa- 
tions. But the fact that some of us have been trained 
from childhood to understand and appreciate this He- 
brew imagery should not make us forgetful of the needs 
of the ordinary man of today who has had no such train- 
ing — one of the eighty per cent of the men of Great Brit- 
ain not in touch with the church — and who is often ir- 
ritated by his utter inability to relate church teachings to 
the matter-of-fact world of reality in which he lives. 
As Canon Barnett, apostle to the East End, said to his 
Anglican friends, out of his deep sympathy for the poor 
of Whitechapel, *'We who feel the charm of the old 
words and phrases need to compel ourselves to remember 
that this feeling is not shared by the majority/' He urged 
on his associates the need of simple intelligible expression 



4 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

of the great truths, because even the best of men in our 
day are for the most part *'too hurried to look for a mean- 
ing which is not on the surface." 

Jesus spoke His undying message in terms so simple 
and universal in their interest as to appeal equally to the 
untaught Syrian peasant of the old world, and to the 
university student of our day. The stories of the prod- 
igal son, the lost sheep, the lilies, and the sparrows, the 
man with the talent in a napkin — the pictures of pride 
and humility and service also — are as vivid and eloquent 
now as when He uttered them. They deal with prim- 
itive and elemental phases of human experience, in its 
many-sided relation with the will of God. The great 
thing He tried to accomplish with men astray from God 
was so pathetically simple as compared with the demands 
of the Thirty-nine Articles, or the Nicene Creed, that 
even the social derelicts of His day could grasp His 
intent and fulfil it. And the great vital realities that 
the man in the street today needs to know and feel, are so 
unembarrassed and tmconfused with metaphysical prob- 
lems or theological subtleties, that they must admit of 
very plain and unconventional statements, suited for prac- 
tical and busy men. As one of the leading philosophers of 
today has said, "Subtle religion is false religion." The 
truth about religion cannot be in itself obscure or intri- 
cate — it corresponds too closely with our most elemental 
instincts for its expression to be limited to a single type 
of traditional presentation, however sacred. 

And so it must be possible, if we choose, to discuss 
the whole question of the teaching of Jesus and His 
place in modern thought and life with a range and free- 
dom quite unembarrassed by traditional limitations. It 
is by no means necessary to confine ourselves to an in- 



A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 5 

terpretation of the viewr-point of the first generation 
of Christian disciples, as in a study of the New Testa- 
ment. Such an interpretation is o'f course indispensable. 
But the field of experience has enormously widened since 
that day. Unhesitating acceptance of Jesus' leader- 
ship was a pure experiment then — it needed a bold and 
trustful heart indeed to step out on that untried way. 
The mental reaction upon it of men like Peter and John 
and Paul was that of men facing a problem bewilderingly 
new and strange. Since their day, however, it has been 
tested and tried and weighed and examined in the labora- 
tory of life in every conceivable way. Millions of earnest 
men and women have lent the undivided energy of their 
souls to its understanding. In every imaginable mortal 
stress, men have trusted the so-called gospel of Jesus, and 
we have the age-long record of their venture of faith. 
Surely a humble, thoughtful man in this twentieth cen- 
tury must have before him a range of facts in illumination 
of the mission of Jesus that Paul never knew, together 
with whole worlds of spiritual experience that lay below 
any horizon he could see, beyond the horizon of his age. 
Of course it is worse than futile — it is disastrous — to 
try to meet the need of our own day for a gospel that 
meets men where they are, that appeals to them so as to 
compel attention, by dropping out of sight the eternal 
realities of redeeming love and forgiving compassion, and 
preaching instead, not the Jewish law, but a new and better 
law suited for the twentieth century — a law of service. 
Of course it is intelligible and interesting — it is divine and 
beautiful and most truly Christian, and the conscience 
yields assent. But it no more meets men's immemorial 
hunger for God and for the daily refreshment of His 
undimmed love and mercy, than the call to pay our 



6 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

debts assures us of a comfortable income. Men are as 
ready as they ever were to listen intently to the realities 
of the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ. But 
the truth today best wins a hearing if it is in a form 
easy to be grasped — if it seems to be 'a part of the every- 
day world in which -we live, and not of a religious shad- 
ow-land of venerable antiquity. 

The following studies are a fragmentary contribu- 
tion to the effort at the re-appraisal of Jesus with which 
the men and women of our generation are engaged. They 
are an interpretation of human experience — a discussion 
of the significance of Jesus for our world — not from the 
standpoint of the Church or even of the New Testament, 
but of an ordinary man of today, reacting on all that 
life has to offer towards a conclusion, from the open-air 
talks of Jesus in the calm of Galilee to the deadly struggle 
of the World War in Europe. It is, to be sure, absurdly 
fragmentary and inadequate as an interpretation, in view 
of the infinite wonder and mystery of the subject. But 
so far as it goes, it deals with realities that the human 
heart thrills to believe and of which it is a joy to speak 
with confidence. 

Note. — There are two assumptions that underlie the whole of 
the following discussions: (i) That we have today in the 
New Testament an indisputable record of the great outlines 
of the life and teaching of Jesus. After all allowance has 
been made for sane sceptical criticism, the picture that remains 
is unchanged in its essential features of incomparable and com- 
pelling power. Neither peasant nor pedant of his day had the 
religious genius to alter substantially the outlines of that supreme 
personality. There are disputable points, of course, where sure 
conclusions may not be within our reach. But in the fields we 
are about to traverse, we walk with a sure step, without apology 
or hesitation. (2) That the only contact of Jesus with our time 
is by way of men's faith in Him. His influence is manifestly 
a spiritual influence, and the only way it can possibly be brought 



A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 7 

to bear is through the livens of those who are willing to receive 
it. His place in any society, as in any individual life, is sharply 
limited by the response accorded Him — whether of sympathy 
or indifference or critical doubt. It would seem to go without 
saying that His power over anyone for go^od must be propor- 
tioned to one's confidence in Him, not to the correctness of 
one's theological beliefs, but to the genuineness of his faith in 
Jesus as a revealer of God. Only as men or nations believe in 
Him, does he bring to them the benefits of which we spoak. 



Chapter II 
THE BRINGER OF LOVE 

Let us go straight to the heart of our subject at the 
beginning, and speak of Jesus as the great bringer of love 
into the life of today. We cannot get closer to the real- 
ity of life, to the actual operative forces of the universe 
we know, than when we come to the power of love. 
There are all sorts of natural forces about us by means 
of which we can work wonders for human comfort, and 
we are apt to be a bit overawed by the overwhelming 
evidences of their value and power in the development of 
modern civiHzation. But not one nor all of them together 
can preserve the civilization whose material welfare they 
have built up, or keep it from falling back into moral 
chaos. They have not the sublime energy in highest 
spheres of development to enable them to deal with human 
hearts, as electricity, e. g., deals with so many refractory 
materials. Half the homes in Europe are bitter with 
misery or want today, or bitterer still with hatred and 
fear and spiritual bankruptcy; and all the resources of 
science are unequal to bringing them back to brother- 
hood and joy. 

But love can do it. Wherever you see a trace of it in 
action in the desolated area, you see a ray of hope break- 
ing through the pall of misery. But it is the only 
natural power of such divine efficiency with human souls 

8 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE g 

as to give any promise in face of so bewildering a 
task. 

When we talk about love, then, we are not dealing with 
mere pious emotion or airy sentiment, but with a reality 
as irresistible in its power as the half-invisible flame of 
the oxy-acetylene torch — only in immeasurably wider 
and more delicate relations. If the place of Jesus in the 
life of today is inseparably associated with a productive 
energy like this, then it is a place of power indeed. And 
as a matter of fact and commonest observation it is so as- 
sociated, as cause with effect — where the influence of Jesus 
comes, there love springs up. Many common folk, per- 
plexed with various doubts, rest on that unshakable fact 
with great comfort of spirit. 

There is no sort of doubt as to what Jesus did for 
the people of his own brief time — He brought love home 
to their lives. The most notable thing He did for them 
was not primarily to bring them comforting words about 
divine benevolence, or new ideas as to the need of love 
in social relations, but the very substance of love itself. 
This was an altogether astonishing thing for a great 
sage or rabbi to do. It was too homely and human to be 
profound, or startling, or original, as the founder of a 
religion is supposed to be. Anyone, not a genius, can 
be kind and compassionate. And yet the chief distinc- 
tion of Jesus was that He warmed with love hearts that 
were dead and cold as burned-out cinders, and brought 
them back to life and God. Many of the hated profiteers 
and plunderers of His day, both men and women, were 
curiously affected by this divine friendliness that could 
not be hidden nor mistaken. It was almost ridiculous 
that they should be attracted to a perfectly unselfish man, 
a preacher of righteousness. It was an utterly incon- 



10 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

gruous association. But they were attracted to Jesus be- 
cause they saw He loved them, and yet was good. The 
scribes and Pharisees went up and down the streets, fairly 
exhaling the odor of sanctity: but just in proportion to 
their righteousness they were cold as ice to the sinners of 
the town. Love and religion made queer company to 
their thinking. But Jesus brought a new thing to the 
light of day — a kind of religion that actually expressed 
itself in sympathy with objectionable people. He broke 
down their defences against goodness before they knew 
where they were : and He carried this so far that He be- 
came known as the friend of undesirable citizens. 

In one way it is easy to understand. It was simply that 
He was so human — not like the religious leaders of his 
day and most days. He understood people better than 
they understood themselves. And seeing how much of 
the divine was in them, marking them out as God's, He 
linked Himself to it as with hooks of steel and tried to 
draw them back to their Father.. It was a strange fas- 
cinating phenomenon in the religious world, to which men 
gave different explanations. 

Jesus Himself gave it an explanatio-n. And here the 
inexhaustible mystery and wonder that have always clung 
about His person assert themselves at once. He claimed 
that He brought love into life for the astounding rea- 
son that He came from the Almighty God. He set the 
door of heaven ajar, and the light that came through was 
that of fervent compassion for human sorrow. 

The religious leaders of His day protested fiercely, as at 
blasphemy against the national Jehovah. The holier men 
were, the wider of necessity was the gulf between them 
and the rabble of the unlearned and unclean : and as for 
the ignorant worshippers of idols, they were fitting fuel 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE ii 

for God's wrath. But the face of Jesus was as wistfully 
kind to the unclean as to the clean, and to the ignorant as 
to the learned. Whatever else was perplexing about 
His mission, this at least was clear, that He turned the 
light of God on the drab Hfe of the common people, and 
lo and behold! it was a light tremulous with the deep 
colors of pity and love and sacrifice. 

We talk of it with glib familiarity, as though the West- 
ern world had always believed it. Yet when, in rare 
moments of spiritual illumination, we catch a fleeting 
glimpse of its reality, that He who is behind all things 
regards us as Jesus regarded those poor straying men and 
women in His day, what glory and wonder our human life 
takes on! One would hardly be afraid of Hfe or death 
if Jesus were right. 

It was a most winsome propaganda while it lasted — 
strangely merciful and unworldly to venture out into 
open competition with the cold wisdom of this world. 
But it lasted — as one might say — only through one long 
summer day, and then night overtook the loving face 
and the friendly voice, and they disappeared forever from 
among men. So far as men could see, only the memory 
of that face and voice remained, in the minds of a few 
peasant friends — no book, no school, no written word, 
only the memory of a divine love searching out human 
need, transitory as a wind in the forest that rustles the 
leaves and then is forgotten. Whatever power of self- 
propagation that love might have, it was left to a few 
loyal hearts in the midst of the sinister selfishness of 
their age. One would have thought it would run out 
quickly — say in three generations at the most: like a 
mountain stream lost in desert sands. A faith, a con- 
viction, a life, so largely interwoven with emotion, would 



12 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

quickly run into strange forms and pass on into other 
manifestations, and so be superseded. Even if left to 
itself, it might be trusted soon to disappear, just because 
of its delicacy and unworldly beauty in an impossible set- 
ting — like a rare exotic, doomed to degenerate among 
common weeds. 

But the little circle of friends of the friendly man was 
not even left to itself. As it grew, it ran into perils in- 
credible, unimaginable — unending in number and variety. 
It lived amid hostile forces, like a lamb in a forest haunted 
by a wolf-pack. The blood-rusted ungulce themselves — 
sharp claws of iron, used by the Roman magistrates to 
tear the flesh of accused Christians — were not so cruel 
as the dangers that sprung up from among themselves. 
The lingering influence of Jesus was not only smothered 
in blood, it was crushed with bigotry, it was volatilized 
in argument. 

And yet, as so shrewd a publicist and man of the world 
as the genial Col. Watterson of Kentucky said only the 
other day, "The teaching and example of the Prince 
of Peace have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance 
and superstition through two thousand years of embittered 
controversy" ; but "never in the history of the world was 
Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant" as 
now. 

In spite of all our pessimisms this fact is clear as the 
sun. Jesus means more to the men of today than He 
ever did to the men of Judea. Bitter as the bigotry and 
strife have been, all the more starvingly eager is the 
wistful hungriness of men for what He still brings to life. 
His own inner circle of friends was bigoted and quarrel- 
some, even when He was with them; and again and 
again He had to call them back to humble, unselfish 



THE BRINGER OF LOVE 13 

brotherliness. And today His call is just as thrillingly 
clear and inevitable that any who follow Him should be 
''tenderhearted, humble-minded, forgiving one another/' 
The incomparably urgent need of society today is for 
just what Jesus brings — self-mastery for the ends of love. 
The nations of the twentieth century need for their de- 
velopment food and clothing and labor, and the raw mate- 
rials of coal and iron and oil and cotton: but they may 
have all these in abundance and yet stagger backward till 
civilization is drowned in night. But the spirit of Jesus, 
love and good-will and self-restraint, will carry on the 
human race to ever higher stages of development. The 
process of development in creation may be hindered and 
brought to a stand in our own century by the self-asser- 
tion of human instincts that ally us with the animals: 
but in Jesus we find the very force needed to carry on 
creation to its consummation. 

One stands in amazement before this fact. We have 
become so used to hear Jesus spoken of in terms of patron- 
age or indifference or unbelief, that we need to shake 
ourselves free of popular affectations to realize that He 
actually supplies to society just the constructive force 
that humanity needs for life and growth. The future of 
humanity is not with the last clever novelist who con- 
descends to the Master. The key to advancement is with 
Jesus. Because moral power radiates from Him. He 
is the living center of operative love. That is not pious 
exaggeration, but prosaic fact legibly written in un- 
counted lives. The reality of power is here. For the 
purposes of unselfish service, Jesus is to men of today what 
the sun is to the plant world. Where He is, life is. 
The thrill of His example spreads far beyond the circle 
of those who name His name — even to Buddhists and 



14 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

agnostics. And as men's hearts turn to Him in honest 
devotion, fresh energies are being released every day 
for social redemption. It is every w^hit as true for fisher- 
men on the Labrador coast as it once was for fishermen 
under the hot skies of Galilee — the fellowship of Jesus 
lifts them up into touch with God and His Fatherly ways. 
He lets the light of heaven shine on their understanding, 
and straightway they see new visions and think unac- 
customed thoughts of gentleness and friendliness with 
men. 

We look to see how this result of power is actually 
achieved in men's lives today through the medium of 
Jesus' personality. Roughly speaking there are two sets 
of conditions that spoil and cripple life and render it ig- 
noble and ineffective. Both of them fight against love — 
they inhibit its operation, and benumb and paralyze the 
more generous impulses of our nature. The old Baby- 
lonians had to fight with them just as do our neighbors 
in the next street, and no conceivable future developments 
of society can alter very much their hostile influence. 
It is the glory of Jesus that He brings in love in spite 
of them- — even by means of them. 

First of all is the eternal enemy of love in every form — 
sin. One shrinks from using a word so inextricably 
bound up with ages of odious controversies, and one so 
thoroughly out of taste today. But what other term 
describes the element we all admit in human nature that 
is like the moth and rust of the soul, ever at work to 
destroy our spiritual possessions? The common, deadly 
selfishness that drinks up love ? 

Our thinking ought to be clearer on this matter than 
it was ten years ago. We have had a riot of sin for 
years — not of the polite artistically draped indulgences 



THE BRINGER OF LOVE 15 

that modern society permits itself, but of the raw pas- 
sions of the brute, scientifically edged and sharpened for 
destruction. We have drunk to the loathsome dregs the 
cup of that will-to-power that unblushingly disassociates 
itself from love and all its works. And tens of millions 
of innocent women and children are still suflfering, day 
and night, because the dregs of the cup are so dreadful 
in their poison of death. Men have thrown away love 
with both hands, in utter abandonment, and they have been 
reaping the destruction that Jesus used to speak about 
in words as awful as the condition of those uncounted 
homes of sorrow. Here is stark reality — such as chills 
the blood to look at near at hand- — the reality of sin. 

And Jesus opposes to it the other reality, equally sure 
but infinitely wider in its scope and reach, the love of His 
Father. Here also was a cup for men to drink, He 
said, with no dregs of death or any disappointment what- 
soever, but a cup of joy — an elixir of life. Not in any 
high-flown, mystical way, for emotional ecstatic natures, 
but in a perfectly obvious way of daily, homely operation 
in the common life of common people. Their Father 
loved them, forgave them, received them back to friendly, 
intimate association, so as to undercut the root of their 
distrust of him, and bring the evil flower of their ill-will 
to the ground, a wilted plant, unable to flourish in the 
wholesome sunlight of His goodness. 

It is impossible for any one to believe heartily in Jesus 
without finding himself being led out into this open sun- 
shine of God's love, as a very first step under the in- 
fluence of the new Leader. We may have been a tor- 
ment to ourselves and to others, because of our wrong 
thinking and wrong doing. An uneasy conscience is a 
ceaseless irritation, making a man "gey ill to live with." 



i6 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

But an uneasy conscience cannot live in one who trusts 
himself to the truth of Jesus' teaching. The poor beg- 
gared spendthrift who crept back to his father's house — 
in Jesus' story — was miserable enough with cankering 
remorse and uncertainty and shame : but all these feelings 
suddenly fell away into speechless gratitude, when he felt 
his father's arms about his neck and knew that his father 
loved him still. A touch of nature makes the whole 
world kin, and in this respect the South Sea savage re- 
acts just as the educated Chinese scholar- — Jesus actually 
brings them into touch with the Almighty Father of their 
spirits, and at this touch of sympathy the whole world 
alters. Forgiveness and the forsaking of what displeases 
Him mean, suddenly, the dawn of a new heaven and a new 
earth. 

We see the all but incredible wonder of it in the lives 
of those who have forgotten what love is, who are yet 
brought by a miracle of kindness within the range of 
Jesus' influence. Years ago a young Scotchman and his 
wife were set ashore on the beach of the island of Tanna, 
in the New Hebrides, in the hope that they might be 
able to bring the gospel of Jesus to the natives. They 
were not able. The islanders were blood-thirsty savages, 
filthy, brutal, dangerous, and delighting in cruelty of 
every kind. Times past remembering they plotted mur- 
der against the man who tried to love them into a true 
manhood. For months he lived in the very shadow of 
death, familiar daily with threat of club and killing 
stone, musket, and spear, in the hands of furious enemies. 
Within four years they drove him out empty handed, 
leaving even his wife and little child buried there by the 
beach, waiting like hostages for his return. 

More than thirty years later, his son, Frank Paton, 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE if 

landed again on the shore of Tanna. The same crowd 
of naked, painted savages, with spears and guns, pressed 
dawn to meet him. Yet now he had certain aids in his 
work anrong them, and very early the work began to show 
results. The very chief who had once led a war party 
to murder his father was among the first converts. An- 
other and another followed. Schools were begun and 
presently a church was formed. And when, at the end 
of only five years, Mr. Paton, broken in health, was forced 
to leave, under what conditions do you suppose he parted 
from them, who had been so lately — both outwardly and 
inwardly — like very children of the devil? "The hardest 
thing to bear," he says, "was the sorrow of the people." 
On the day just before his departure the church was 
crowded in the early morning with hundreds of those 
who had come to a farewell service. One stalwart man, 
who had become himself a teacher, spoke on the words, 
"Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." 
With tears rolling down his face, he told them how 
true these words were of their own pastor, who had suf- 
fered with them and for them, and now was going away 
in sickness. Then the war chief, lavis, rose, and after 
speaking on the verse, "What shall it profit a man if he 
gain the whole world and lose his own soul," begged the 
people to show their love for their missionary by being 
better Christians. Then with prayer and singing the 
meeting concluded. 

In the moving words of Mr. Paton, "It was a dreadful 
parting from our people. Death would have been easier 
than that terrible wrench. As the steamer moved out, 
we watched the light in our home till it faded into the 
darkness, and then we went below to battle through the 
sorest night in all our life. We may travel far afield, 



i8 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

. . . but we shall never meet with nobler or more Girist- 
like men than Lomai and his brave fellow-teachers. 
They are heroes, every one of them, God's Heroes." 

A great power house at Niagara is a wonderful sight, 
but is there anywhere a whirring dynamo whose energy 
is in any way comparable with the power behind thfiose 
words, ^'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our 
sorrows''? The reality of love, and especially of love 
that suffers in silence, plays upon the hearts of men of 
all tribes and peoples, as the high current plays upon the 
lighting system of a great city. And it is undeniably 
in Jesus that we find the undying center of those high 
currents of spiritual power that lift men out of degrada- 
tion and make them heroes who had been vicious cowards. 

Hardly less impressive is the experience of one at the 
opposite end of the scale from those imbruted cannibals, 
one whose whole life was a seeking after God, yet barren 
and forlorn for lack of love to feed upon. The story 
of the well-known Chundra Lela, of India, throws a 
clear ray of light on the singular power of Jesus' influence 
to make love triumph over the restlessness of an uneasy 
conscience. Born in India, far up among the mountains 
of Nepal, of a priestly Brahman family, she was left 
a child-widow at the age of nine. Nevertheless her 
father gave her a careful education, and took her with him 
when she was but twelve years old, on her first pilgrimage 
to Juggernath, where he died of cholera. More and more 
eagerly she studied the sacred books of the Hindus, 
until she decided that a vision of God and forgiveness of 
sins would be worth more to her than anything else in 
the world. With this one end in view she left home with 
two other widows of like mind, on a long series of pil- 
grimages to the sacred places of India, seeking some 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 19 

evidence that the Supreme Being was pleased with her 
worship. Thousands of miles they travelled on foot, 
through perils innumerable, of robbers and wild beasts 
and pestilence and famine, taking seven years to com- 
plete the circuit of the holy places. But no comfort 
came to her, nor any rest of soul, though she was now 
a devotee and holy woman, reverenced by all for her piety. 
Again she set out upon her fruitless quest, hungry of 
soul for what no temple or priest could give. This time 
she went far up into Assam, and there on the Brahma- 
putra River, surrounded on three sides by hills and 
forests, she lived alone for eight years, far from any 
human habitation, striving to gain by austerities and 
self-torture the approval of God she craved. Only twice 
in these years did she see the face of a human being, and 
the story of the self-inflicted torments she underwent is 
all but incredible to a Western mind. 

The forests, like the temples, brought her no rest. She 
returned to India, and there for the first time learned of 
the Christian Bible. She secured a copy and for months 
studied it together with the Hindu Shasters. The story 
of Jesus filled her with inexpressible hope and longing, 
and in the end her prayers were answered and her heart 
overflowed with joy as she put her trust in him. She 
was a Christian! From that time, for more than thirty 
years, until her body was feeble and her hair white with 
age, she went up and down through northern India, 
known everywhere as a "holy woman,'' telling of the love 
of God that had come to her through Jesus Christ. She 
had found that which made her forlorn life blossom like 
the rose, and she gave that late blooming life utterly to 
Him who had brought deliverance. 

The finest flower of our own type of intellectual develop- 



20 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

ment is not too proud to make the same confession of 
loyalty to Him who has made love triumph in their lives, 
in spite of their own fears and failures. Witness that 
last word of Charles Cuthbert Hall, in which he left di- 
rections for his funeral service : 

"I have indicated what shall be said and sung today 
because my one great longing is for the joy of wit- 
nessing in death, as I have tried to witness in life, 
to my adoration and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, 
my Lord and my God in whom I rest securely for 
salvation, pardon, and peace. I lie among my 
friends. They love me. I love them." 

We read behind those simple lines the moving story 
of a glowing life-purpose, incandescent with the trans- 
mitted energy of love. And it is the same story that 
underlies that last ''author's prayer" of Professor Raus- 
chenbusch, 'Tardon the fraility of thy servant, and look 
upon him only as he sinks his life in Jesus, his Master 
and Saviour." 

Both of these men were intensely modern; they were 
alive in every fibre with social sympathies. But they 
bore glad witness that this love was the overflow of a 
life made possible only by what Jesus Christ had brought 
them. Their very memory is like sunshine: is there 
any doubt from whence that sunshine came? 

Professor Rauschenbusch would have believed in Jesus 
in a far different way from that poor transfigured cannibal 
of the New Hebrides, just as Dr. Martineau and Mr. 
Moody and Col. Roosevelt would each have had a 
sharply differing view-point for regarding Him. Yet 
all would have agreed that Jesus made life rich and 
beautiful, because He set the way to God wide open in 
spite of sin. Jonathan Edwards made the average worldly 



THE BRINGER OF LOVE 21 

man feel that God was the awful Sovereign and Judge, 
whose wrath was the very element in which he lived. 
Jesus made the careless men and women of His time to 
feel that God — in every way^ — was better to them than 
the fathers whom they knew. If fathers were tender and 
forgiving toward their often wilful children, *'how much 
more" did their Father in heaven long for their good, 
and welcome their stumbling efforts to return to Him. 
And Jesus has this place in the life of today, that, where- 
ever men believe in His word. He makes them know that 
between them and God there may be a flawless sympathy. 
Not a half-suspicious, half-grudging toleration on His 
part, secured on the credit of another ; but limpid natural 
affection, as between father and son. And every atom of 
its strength and purpose leads men, as they perceive it, to 
forsake and hate the sin that as a matter of experience 
shuts them out from Him. So love takes possession 
of them. 

Even 'With the clear assurance of Jesus' word, many of 
the best men and women of our day never come to trust 
God's love as they would trust their own father's. For 
them, God is not as human as Jesus, not as good as 
the parents of their childhood home. The old terror 
of the Oriental monarch still clings about Him. There 
is a story of a little girl who was learning to write. 
With laborious effort she had prepared a whole sheet of 
her handwriting, to show her father as a surprise. One 
night when he came home, his little daughter brought 
him her masterpiece, and with pride and joy submitted 
it for his approval. Several small blots were on the 
page, which were — even in her eyes — a disagreeable in- 
trusion. But over these she laid her hand, saying, "Don't 
see the blots, father!" What father would be deaf to 



22 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

such an appeal? The spirit and purpose of her loving 
effort were what counted, and not the staring imperfec- 
tions of her pathetic attempt to please him. 

But, as many of us well know, we do not give God 
credit for being as good as that. We do not believe in 
Jesus' teaching at this point. What is called the "New 
England conscience'' is a sorry reflection upon God's 
patience and sympathy with His children. If we come 
to God at night with the story of the day, often it is only 
of the blots we are thinking, and only the blots that we 
suppose will attract His attention. And the result is 
to keep always a cloud between ourselves and God, to 
keep us always uncertain and uneasy as to His favor, and 
so to rob life of the free gladness of His love. To be- 
lieve in Jesus is to have a better wisdom than this, for 
still He assures men that all we know of human love and 
forbearance is but a poor reflection of what is in our 
Father's heart. 

It is not wholly amiss to recall the street-boy's defini- 
tion of a friend, as "a feller who knows all about yer, but 
likes yer just the same." Some of us haven't even the 
homely good sense to trust that God comes up to the 
level of a friend ! We are still partly under the influence 
of ancestors who thought they pleased God by living in 
an atmosphere of sorrowful self-reproach and extrava- 
gant self-depreciation. As Jonathan Edwards said in his 
diary, among many similar expressions, *^When I look 
into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it 
looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell." What 
sort of family life would be possible where the children 
so abased themselves in perpetual remorse for their 
shortcomings, they seem never to have considered. In 
any case, Jesus brings to men of this as of every day the 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 23 

natural, wholesome life of love, in spite of sin and blunder- 
ing and failure. It is only the plainest outcome of ex- 
perience to affirm that there is no other name under 
heaven given among men that can give such assurance of 
eternal goodness, reaching out of the infinite unseen, to 
assist and beautify our familiar daily plodding through 
these earthly years. 

But there is something gravely wrong with life besides 
the wrongness of men's hearts — something bewilderingly 
wrong and hostile. The terms of this earthly struggle for 
existence are not what one would expect in God's world 
^ — they are too harsh! Huxley and Spencer were after 
all hardly more drastic in their summing up of the merci- 
lessness of Nature than was Paul, when he said "the 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
until now." Life is kind to a chosen few: but on many 
sensitive hearts its forces beat like flails, bruising and be- 
numbing with sheer pain: not kindly pain, directed 
to helpful uses, but senseless, useless suffering, em- 
bittering the spirit like punishment undeserved. Men 
strike out against it blindly, and because they see no one 
else to blame, they blame God. Love dies at the root, 
and faith with it: and God's face is hidden from them. 

One remembers what .Mrs. Annie Besant said to' 
Moncure Conway, as they came out of the court-room 
where the judge had just taken from her the care of her 
little daughter — ''It is a pity there isn't a God : it would 
do one so much good to hate him." During these last 
few years we have heard from bewildered hearts, tor- 
tured by the spectacle of suffering, many such utterances 
as this, voicing the bitterness of their distress of doubt. 
Dr. Fort Newton, of the City Temple in London, quotes 
a letter he received from one of the boys of the church 



24 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

in the trenches, dated ''Somewhere in Hell." One of the 
sentences ran as follows: ''Dear Preacher, forgive me 
writing so. I know you will forgive, but who will forgive 
God? Not I — not I. This war makes one hate God. 
. . . He let it happen. Omnipotent ! and — He let it hap- 
pen. Omniscient ! He knew it in advance — and he's let 
it happen. I hate Him. . . . You have been kinder to 
me than God has been." 

God knows, men and women who speak like this are 
distraught with pain. But there are many of them thus 
distraught, and life for them is a feverish rebellion against 
things as they are. The comfort of a reassuring love 
passes them by, leaving them defiant and hard and often 
dangerous to society. i 

There are many more who never reach defiance, whose 
spirits are yet broken by misfortune. The pleasant 
light of life dies out and leaves them in the shadow. 
They are defeated by life's hardness and carry their bur- 
den heavily through dragging years, making the world 
a sadder place for others, because of their self-pity and 
discouragement. It may be sickness, or failure, or lone- 
liness, or fear : but whatever it is — and no one can deny 
the strain and sorrow of it — it robs them of life's joy 
and shuts them out from the comfort of their Father's 
presence. It is wholly pitiful to think of the number of 
those who, for one reason or another, lead dispirited, 
drooping lives, without the resilience and buoyancy of 
love triumphant over all. 

The place of Jesus is of one who brings back victory 
of the spirit to those who, but for Him, had been sullen 
and defeated or perhaps only heart-broken. It is not 
so easy to say just how He does it, but that He does it^ — 
for those who believe in Him — we have the grateful wit- 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 25 

ness of men and women past numbering, in every walk 
of life and in every generation. He floods one's con- 
sciousness with the assurance on which He Himself 
rested in the dark, that a Father's ten'derness is behind 
and above all distress, and that He will not let his child- 
dren slip from His remembrance and good care. 

They suffer — yes. Nothing interferes to save! But 
the suffering is not the last word. The last word is 
victory and joy and love triumphant. That is the con- 
fidence which Jesus had in His own heart when He was de- 
spised and forsaken of men, and He somehow puts it, 
indestructible, in the hearts of those who trust in Him. 
"When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto 
me. 

He does not do it by argument, or by reiterated prom- 
ises. In His daily meeting with anxious men and women 
He must have said numberless reassuring things, sooth- 
ing the sting of their sorrow and reviving their courage. 
But hardly a trace of them has been preserved. It is 
nothing less than astonishing that the three first gospels 
have so few utterances explaining life's hardness and 
affirming the compassion of God. Jesus does not even 
once use the word "love" of His Father, as does the Old 
Testament so often with deep feeling — so completely do 
the simple records shun any tendency to sentiment or 
emotion. But every day of His life unfolded the divine 
compassion in ways that the world w*ill not forget, and 
every fresh glimpse of His calm self-possession reveals 
His confidence that love and not evil will win the day. 

This is what makes men today stand courageously firm 
in circumstances where their hearts ache with trouble 
they can neither explain nor relieve. They might crum- 
ple up under it morally, losing faith in God and courage 



26 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

for life and the spiritual victory that makes one great. 
It is easy to show yellow^ — to give up, or break down, or 
turn bitter. But when one sees Jesus standing over 
against him — like one stricken, smitten of God, and af- 
flicted — yet undefeated, unafraid, majestic in His trusting 
obedience to His Father's will, then one needs no argu- 
ment. This is not a "rotten world," this same world in 
which Jesus once went quietly to His death, triumphing 
by faith and love. If He rested on His Father's goodness, 
in spite of pain and shame surging over Him in the dark, 
then who are we to lose heart and faith when the hard 
days come and heavy clouds lie like lead upon our 
spirits ! If He could rest on God's love to the very end, 
then we who believe in Him can do nothing else in our 
sharp trials. In any case, explain it as you will, the 
spirit of Jesus in human hearts today makes men look 
up in love and hope where, but for Him, their eyes would 
be bent miserably upon the ground. 

Life all about us is full of instances of this reality. 
The heroic triumphs of spirit, maintained by love that 
cannot understand yet stakes all on Jesus' word, are all 
around us, in humble lives of which the wise world never 
hears. Years ago the writer well knew a young mother, 
glorified by pride and joy in a little daughter, her baby. 
Suddenly it was stricken down by infantile paralysis, 
and the mother, who longed to shield it from every 
breath of pain, had to look on, day after day and week 
after week, while the smiling face grew drawn and hag- 
gard with suffering. Even for friends who came in for 
an hour, it was a sight too sad to see. But for her, the 
mother, whose arms could no longer rest the little griev- 
ing daughter, it was such a way of sorrow as often 
makes of life a hopeless enigma of blinding disappoint- 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 27 

ment. But .because her spirit rested on the assurance of 
Jesus, when the end came she wrote her pastor: — 

"We look to you to voice our gratitude for so much 
of beauty and'dehght and sweetness, which has been and 
still is ours. We both feel very strongly that we cannot 
thank the dear Father enough. . . . We know that some 
day the revelation will be given of what these suffering 
months have wrought for her. How good He has been 
to keep our faith through the time of mystery and dark- 
ness ! In all the trial there has not been a drop of bitter- 
ness." 

If He can make love so triumphant, without strain, even 
in life's darkest hours, then there is a great place for 
Him today in the lives of men and women^ — perhaps even 
in our own. 

Take from India another instance, of the place of 
Jesus in life's dark realities. There was a bright, happy 
young girl of seventeen in an Indian orphanage — popular 
with all, engaged to be married, delighting in a glad 
world. Without warning, there broke out sores upon 
her hands that shut her up to a living death as a leper. 
She was admitted to the Leper Asylum opened by that 
well-known friend of the forlorn, Sam Higginbottom of 
Allahabad. He tells of her arrival there. 

''Arrived at the asylum, we all went in. It was not into 
the beautiful quarters we have now, but into a miserable, 
tumble-down collection of dilapidated mud huts, not 
fit for the habitation of any living thing. This fair young 
girl, dressed in her white clothes, looked round this 
fearful place,, and caught sight of a group of creatures 
crouched under the trees. She took one look and then 
threw her head on her brother's shoulder and sobbed as 
though her heart would break. She asked : 'Is that what 



28 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

I am coming to? Am I going to be as one of those?' " 

A few days later, trying to comfort her, he reminded 
her of how much had come into her Hfe from others 
to make it richer and fuller and better, and urged her 
to have a school for those forlorn women, and to teach 
them some of the hymns she knew. She agreed to try. 
Months afterwards she opened her heart to one of the 
missionary doctors : 

"She said when she first went into the Leper Asylum 
she did not believe there was any God ; or, if there were a 
God, He could not be a God of love and afflict any human 
being as He had afflicted her. 'But now,' she continued, 
'every day I live I thank God he made me a leper, be- 
cause as a leper He has given me a work to do for Him 
that otherwise I would have known nothing about.' 

"As one went through the women's quarters and saw 
the women, clean and neat and tidy, with hope in their 
faces and songs in their hearts, nearly every one of them 
having learned to know Jesus and having confessed Him, 
it was evident that the consecrated life of this Indian leper 
girl had borne abundant fruit for the glory of God and 
the help of His afflicted children. 

"Today, eleven years after she first entered the asylum, 
she is the same sweet Christian. She shows traces of the 
awful sufifering caused by the disease, but behind the 
furrows of pain one sees the radiant calm of one who has 
found Jesus able to save." 

Amid a thousand perplexities, we are sure that there is 
no nobler capacity in life than this, to be able to wring 
victory out of defeat, and to make love blossom out of 
conditions that breed bitterness and rebellious protest. 
And we find this capacity in lives all about us, rooted in a 
faith in Jesus. His conviction as to the divine love behind 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 29 

the menacing* evil, becomes their conviction. Arthur 
Lyttleton, British Secretary of State for the Colonies a few 
years since, had certain severe trials, ending with death 
of his little boy. But out of it all, and in spite of its bruis- 
ing impact on his soul, he drew the * 'unalterable conviction 
that there is strength and beauty and glory to be won 
from these awful events." Our world desperately needs 
the forces of such an unconquerable faith in love beyond 
all, and we find them in fact inseparably associated with 
the influence of Jesus. 

It would be a great mistake to suppose that His touch 
on the life of today is felt only as men are directly con- 
scious of His personal agency, or as the love that re- 
fines their lives reaches them through the channel of 
ecstatic or mystical feeling. It would no doubt be a won- 
derful and convincing experience to have a new world 
dawn on one as it did on Paul, or Chundra Lela, or thou- 
sands of other twice-born souls, as through the direct, 
personal agency of the great Revealer. Many people still 
would like to think that all divine agencies must be super- 
natural agencies, working by means that are miraculous 
or at least marvellous. But as we now well understand, 
God's divinest ways with men are often very homely and 
familiar ways, so natural and unobtrusive as scarcely to 
excite remark. And as a matter of fact, Jesus is a 
bringer of heavenly love into the lives of this generation 
by means so simply natural, that thousands of our young 
people, inexpressibly indebted to Him, are hardly con- 
scious of any debt at all. The incalculable value of His 
contribution to their lives escapes their notice, because they 
fail to notice how far their moral heritage is of His 
creating. 

The love of God may seem to us to be at best some- 



30 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

thing very unsubstantial and far away — and so indeed it 
is, if it is to dawn on us only through visions or spiritual 
transports. But suppose it looked out on us first through 
our own mother's eyes, bending over us in infancy, and 
that we saw it in our father's face long before we knew 
how that tender and gracious affection was a reflection of 
the true glory of Jesus Christ, whose spirit lived in them 
triumphantly and made our father and mother what they 
were. Then followed a host of influences in our lives, 
all radiating from that same divine center of unselfish 
love — ^brothers and sisters, teachers, friends, associates. 
Christian leaders and pastors, great loving minds of the 
past also, that spoke to us through books — a thousand 
subtle and interweaving appeals to what is noblest in us, 
all springing from that living center of goodness, and all 
revealing our Father in heaven. The lines fall to us 
in pleasant places, we have a goodly heritage! Why? 
Surely not because we are so superlatively deserving, 
but because this Jesus so immediately and powerfully 
lived in our ancestors and still lives in the lives of His 
disciples all about us. Stupid we are, and blind and deaf, 
not to feel the incalculable riches of the love that has 
always been at work upon us — the imperishable energy of 
Jesus, mediated to us through the agency of those who 
live by Him. 

A few days ago a wretched negro murderer was hur- 
ried away to the gallows. He was not fit to live, and he 
knew it. But he said in explanation, and said truly, that 
he had never had a chance. Kicked into the world and 
forsaken by cruel parents, kicked and beaten and abused 
through all his childhood, growing up among drunken 
criminals in ignorance of any better thing, despised and 
feared by society, his hand was against every man, and he 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 31 

died as he had lived, undesired and unloved. Against that 
lurid background we can measure something of our in- 
debtedness to Him who has caused our life to be actually 
rooted and grounded in Christian love — in the pervasive 
reality of a divinely helpful sympathy, reflected on us 
from infancy, from a hundred angles, because Jesus still 
reproduces His gentleness in the hearts of men. That is 
the way God most evidently makes Himself known to our 
generation, through the lives of men and women brought 
into spiritual contact with Him by the agency of an Elder 
Brother, the great friend of men. It is a great League 
of Love and Light, with our God at its head. And as a 
maitter of fact and history and experience, men discover 
it and come into it under the leadership of this man of 
Nazareth, whose fervent friendship made him a Man of 
Sorrows. That is why he still has the name that is above 
every name, because he leads through love to life. 

^Through love to light! O, wonderful the way 
That leads from darkness to the perfect day ! 
From darkness and from sorrow of the night 
To morning that comes singing o'er the sea." 

Let us not leave this phase of our subject without re- 
membering once more how exquisite and supreme a ser- 
vice Jesus renders to human life when He attunes it to 
love as its major key. No conceivable degree of good 
fortune in material things is quite equal in value or perma- 
nence to this blessing. More and more as life goes on, 
one may apply to love the acid test and prove its unap- 
proachable primacy among all human possessions. 

Nothing makes this more clear than the clairvoyant re- 
appraisal of life's values that comes with severe illness. 
After certain days or weeks of invading pain and weak- 



32 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

ness, one reaches — ^perhaps with a half-conscious sense of 
reHef — a day when one no longer thinks of this world as 
his own. Its pursuits have slipped away from him, 
perhaps forever. Its boisterous appeals to his life-long 
interest, in business or politics or literature or reform, 
quite fail to reach his spirit in the strange border-land 
of detachment where he now lives, with only the nurse 
and the doctor and the weary struggle for rest as his 
chief concerns. But when he has come into these deep 
waters, where he finds no standing-ground at all, and 
where all his possessions have suddenly lost value and 
faded out into vague unreality, when he gropes con- 
fusedly for some reality on which his mind may rest with 
comfort, then love remains supreme, alone. Nothing can 
rob him of its power. His work may be finished, but 
by God's mercy he can still love — the noblest part of him 
still lives, faintly felt but invincible. His wife, his chil- 
dren, his friends, the neighbors who daily send in re- 
membrances of their loving sympathy, and those, too, who 
have long since passed into that other world now so near 
— yes, and his Father in heaven also, who has loaded 
life with benefits — he is conscious that they love him and 
he loves them all, and that even the waters of death can- 
not drown that undying part of himself. And with 
even greater restfulness he knows that, as never before, 
their love now encompasses him: it watches by his bed- 
side, it suffers with his suffering; his Father is with him 
in the dark and pain, and nothing can spoil that assurance, 
or quite loosen its hold upon him. He cannot think of the 
great doctrines, his spirit may be too dulled for prayer 
' — but believing in Jesus he knows that love is there with 
him, that it will not leave him as the world slips away, 
and that it will even be waiting for him when he ventures 



THE B RINGER OF LOVE 33 

out solitary into the infinite unknown. The whole wide 
universe has nothing else that reaches or relieves him in 
his extremity — but underneath are the everlasting arms 
of love. 

Is that not a rare imperishable essence that Jesus in- 
fuses into life? And would any man in his senses speak 
slightingly or patronizingly of Him who enriches life's 
relationships with this enduring fragrance? Yet if hu- 
man consciousness bears unhesitating witness to any ex- 
perience in life it is to this, that we love because He first 
loved us. He also that abideth in love abideth in God. 
This is the faith that Jesus brings to men and women of 
today. 



Chapter III 
THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 

In that imperishable classic of the soul, the Shepherd 
Psalm, one of the great affirmations runs, "He leadeth 
me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake." 
Imagination tends rather to catch on the opening sentences 
— on the idyllic pictures of the green pastures and the 
still waters, and even on the valley of the dark shadow, 
with the shepherd safely leading. But after all, we know 
that the very heart of the poem is in this central emphasis 
on the paths of righteousness. Here is the deep reason- 
able foundation that underlies the truth of all this high 
imagining. It is because God leads forever in ways of 
righteousness, that His children may sing confidently of 
pastures green and living waters. Other paths there 
are that lead into the desert and to death. But it is not our 
Father who leads His children there. His righteousness 
is like the great mountains. Justice and judgment are 
the habitation of His throne. 

And so most naturally, when Jesus was seeking to make 
men understand what God was like. He filled this ancient 
psalm full of new meaning and reality. He gave it 
substance. He brought it within men's understanding, 
and gave it a deathless hold on their loyalty and afifection. 
For when it spoke by faith alone of Jehovah as the 
Shepherd of His people, was not Jesus in visible reality 
the Good Shepherd? Did He not, before men's eyes, 

34 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS .35 

Himself walk through the valley of the shadow, and there, 
seeing the wolf coming, give His life for the sheep ? He 
made the colors of that old picture glow with the splendor 
of the tenderness of God. And most of all did He give 
color and reality to this central affirmation. He leadeth 
us in the paths of righteousness. He could do no less 
if God indeed were to shine through Him on the ignorance 
and unbelief of men. 

To be sure, the world was deadly sick of righteousness 
in a way, and Jesus had need to present it in some new 
color, if he were to make men really hunger for it. The 
scribes and Pharisees were always before them, as the 
unco guid were always before the eyes of Robert Burns 
— and little help either of them brought to the poor 
wastrels of their time. But it -makes one thank God 
and take courage that Jesus was so divine as to put God 
in a new light, so that very weak and shifty people came 
naturally to a steadfast purpose to do His will — actually 
grew into righteous people — because the whole outlook 
of their life was changed. No doubt it was love changed 
it, but it put iron into their character, who had been like 
reeds shaken by the wind. Jesus led them to God, and 
this v/as the inevitable result, that they began at once to 
grow like Him. They could not really live in touch with 
their Father and not think His thoughts and try to follow 
His ways. This is what Jesus did, and infallibly does, 
before our eyes today, for those who trust His leadership. 
He commits them to a life of righteousness. 

It is something as normal and natural as any other 
process of life. We need to be clear on this point, for 
there have been centuries of almost impenetrable mystery 
and unreality surrounding it. The words and example 
of Jesus Himself leave us in no doubt of the central fact, 



36 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

so simple and yet infinite in scope. He came to put men 
right with God, in the only possible way, by leading them 
to choose to do His will. When a woman out of the 
crowd called out in her enthusiasm, **Happy is the mother 
who bore you/' with its suggestion of an inner circle of 
God's favored, Jesus answered, "Yea rather, blessed are 
they that hear the word of God and keep it.'' Again he 
said, "Not every one that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall 
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the 
will of my Father which is in heaven." Nothing was 
greater or wiser or better than just to do right in God's 
sight. And when someone told Him in the house, "Thy 
mother and thy brethren stand without desiring to speak 
with thee"; He answered, "Whosoever shall do the will 
of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." 

This is what Jesus was trying to bring about in the 
people whom He met from day to day — something very 
plain and simple, but very real and searching. They were 
to choose God's will just as children are loyally obedient 
to their father. A little girl in His audience could under- 
stand that, or a peasant, or household drudge. But for 
many centuries the Church has wrapped this central pur- 
pose of Jesus round with mystery and puzzling difficulty, 
so that its appealing simplicity has been much obscured. 

How many of us can sympathize keenly with Harriet 
Beecher Stowe, when she was a little girl in the parsonage 
at Litchfield. With all her heart she longed to be right 
with God and to do His will as one of His children: but 
how she was to cross the line from being a child of wrath 
to being a daughter of the household, she could not see. 
Her father's doctrinal sermons were no more intelligible 
to her "than if they had been in Choctaw," and from 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS n 

month to month she was held, miserable and afraid, out- 
side the threshold, longing to enter in. 

And then one day her father preached a communion 
sermon, without notes, straight from his true, warm heart, 
on Jesus as a friend offered to every human being. "For- 
getting all his hair-splitting distinctions and dialectic sub- 
tleties, he spoke in direct, simple, and tender language of 
the great love of Christ." Harriet, then fourteen years 
old, listened with growing wonder and delight, her '*whole 
soul illumined with joy." She chose to follow Jesus' 
call as naturally and eagerly as a sheep might follow its 
shepherd, and she went home that day in a new world of 
gladness and peace, to tell her father she had become a 
Christian. She had run in under his guard, so to speak, 
and was safe. And he, like a good father, was too wise 
to turn her back into the wilderness, though she had 
come into the fold in a strange way and with dangerous 
ease. 

But when next year she went to Hartford, and made 
application to be received into the church there, the pastor 
— trusted friend of Dr. Beecher's — turned to the timid 
little girl, after her simple confession of faith and love, 
and said, "Harriet, do you feel that if the universe should 
be destroyed, you could be happy with God alone ?" The 
awful picture was hardly to be realized on the instant, but 
she faltered, "Yes." The doctor continued, "You real- 
ize, I trust, in some measure at least, the deceitfulness 
of your heart, and that in punishment for your sins God 
might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as 
you have made yourself sinful?" Again she whispered, 
"Yes," but the old torturing fears and perplexities had 
returned upon her : the path, then, could not be so simple 



38 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

as it seemed : and it was years before she again fought her 
way through the wilderness into the pleasant light of 
the simple invitation of Jesus. 

If we of today have swung over to the opposite extreme, 
it is most natural and wholesome and inevitable, after the 
doctrinal refinements of many centuries have so often 
obscured the primary intent of Jesus' message to man- 
kind. He was trying to turn the hearts of the children to 
the Father, that they might do His will — ^there in Galilee 
— as it is done in heaven. And still this is the place He 
holds among men- — with no lesser or more puzzling aim 
than this, that they should walk as forgiven children 
the ways of God. He confronts all men, everywhere, 
with this primary demand for righteous living, and He 
leads the way, so that they may be able to follow. The 
mystery of infinite love encircles it all around, -but the 
human duty and privilege are in homely terms that all 
fathers and sons, all mothers and daughters, can under- 
stand. 

Never was the world less able to dispense with such 
leadership as this. It needs to hear, clear as a trumpet 
call, the divine authoritative demand for righteousness. 
It is the supreme need of the hour, even though society 
has fallen out of humor with it, and prefers the witty, 
mocking voices of its own prophets. No one questions 
that the people of the nations are sick with longing for 
quietness, and peace, and far-stretching sunny vistas of 
security and good-will. Everywhere, beneath gaiety and 
misery alike, is a fierce unrest and discontent with the 
present order. Men seek for some new lubricant for 
the wheels of civilization. A League of Nations might 
answer, or a Peace Court at the Hague, or a non-competi- 
tive industrial system, or some sfweeping social readjust- 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 39 

ment. Something new must be found to check the dis- 
integrating forces visibly at work on every side. 

Yet what is needed is nothing new. It is something 
so prosaic, old-fashioned, and sternly uninviting as right- 
eousness — so commonplace, so Puritanic, so Philistine in 
its uncouth associations ! Can any reasonable man sug- 
gest an alternative? If he could, if some very clever per- 
son could find a better way, then Christainity would col- 
lapse speedily, as so many have been expecting it to do, 
for a thousand years and more. But until that new 
prophet has appeared, to introduce a social force more 
constructive than Jesus offers, we of this day must be- 
lieve in Jesus just because He holds men so firmly and un- 
compromisingly to God's order — the order of His Father's 
kingdom. He summons men individually to yield their 
lives to God's direction. There is something splendid, 
something majestic, about the life He calls them to — a 
life rooted in the Eternal Goodness. But that is just the 
place that Jesus fills in the world of today, the place of 
one who undoubtedly does lead men to this high fellow- 
ship with the Unseen — a fellowship in righteousness. 

What is the infallible note of an honest association 
with Jesus, such as might warrant one in being called 
Christian? An acute student of the races of the Near 
East has recently said that "in the Levant the typical 
Christian is an accomplished liar, and abject coward, and 
a noxious parasite, pimp, and pander." Even if we dis- 
count this fifty per cent, for possible prejudice or exag- 
geration, the statement still concurs with history's esti- 
mate of Byzantine Christianity for a millennium. 

That is the ty'pe of Christianity that ^'failed to prevent" 
the late war. A "Christian Europe," on such formal and 
quite illusory lines as these, is the one that threatens in a 



40 PLACE OF JESUS' IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

few years to take up war again, for frankly selfish pur- 
poses. Whatever ''Christian" may mean in such connec- 
tions as this, it evidently does not mean the actual religion 
of Jesus, or anything resembling it. 

What is it that the spirit of Jesus still demands of 
men today, and what does He make of men and women 
who actually follow Him? 

There is no doubt that the average man's idea of religion 
that makes one acceptable to God is a strange, impossible 
compound. It has to do with baptism, and the Church, 
and believing many things one does not understand, with 
setting up to be more pious than other men, with Bible 
reading and saying prayers and attending meetings. On 
the other hand, Donald Hankey has left us an unforget- 
able picture of the average man's religion or ideal, as it 
came to the front in the field life of the British army. 
We cannot do better than study it a moment, familiar as 
it is, to see how it compares, not with conventional church 
religion but with what Jesus demands and measurably 
secures from those who follow Him. 

The average man — so Hankey says — may be immoral 
or irreligious, but there are certain moral qualities he 
admires and others that he despises. He admires courage, 
generosity, practical kindness, honesty, persistence in try- 
ing to do the right thing. He despises meanness, physical 
fear, moral cowardice, instability, equivocation, narrow- 
mindedness, S'ubservience to rank or power or wealth. 
He hates "swank," cant, cruelty. Singularly enough, as 
Hankey reminds us, this picture so far as it goes is like 
the ideal of the gospel^ — it fits in with what Jesus taught. 
It would be easy to point out, item by item, how Jesus 
nobly presented the very qualities the enlisted man 
admires, how He fought with the things despised, and how 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 41 

completely He loathed the cruel pride and insincerity that 
honest men detest. 

And yet the average man scarcely associates this moral 
ideal of his — this working religion — either with Jesus or 
with his Church. It shows how dreadfully out of joint 
present religious conditions are, that the very type of char- 
acter Jesus came to bring should not even be associated 
with him in the popular mind, but that, instead, the mes- 
sage of Jesus should be identified with a puzzling mass of 
ecclesiastical teachings that the average man turns away 
from as impossible or unreal. 

This is certainly not altogether the fault of the Church. 
It has struggled w^th its task heroically, but it has been 
clogged by a heavy burden of tradition relentlessly im- 
posed upon it for centuries, and it has often failed to put 
first things first. Many of the unrealities the average man 
objects to become as real and natural as living itself, 
when one has made the acquaintance with Jesus and has 
come humbly back to God. Moreover, the ordinary man 
in the street has an insincerity and a cant of his own, 
when he talks about the kind of religion that appeals to 
him. As Hankey points out, he is often abominably 
selfish in his pleasures, and his actual living is stained with 
the moral cowardice he affects to despise. There is a 
good deal of camouflage about his profession of ideals. 

But with Jesus there is no cant or camouflage what- 
ever. He stands for the average man's ideal of righteous- 
ness, quite without reservation. Not as something to be 
put on as a garment, but as the natural living out of an 
inward spirit — the doing right because one is right. And 
He asks a good deal more than does the ordinary man^ — as 
we should expect. Even we feel that we need a more 
exacting guide and leader in matters of righteousness than 



42 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

the man from the trenches. The voice of the people, as a 
matter of history, is not apt to be quite Hke the voice of 
God, nor are the thoughts of the crowd Hke God's 
thoughts in the concerns of the soul. And Jesus leaves 
the crowd utterly behind in the requirements he lays on 
men — he outruns all our feeble ideas of unselfish helpful- 
ness. He teaches that a man should not try to crowd to 
the front of the procession. "If any man would be first," 
He said, "he shall be last of all and minister of all." He 
took on Himself the servile office of washing their feet, 
saying, "If I, then, the Lord and the Master, have washed 
your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet." He 
firmly demanded self-mastery for the purpose of love, 
purity in deed and thought, and faithfulness in duty — 
where popular thought only hesitatingly follows Him. 
And before and above all He sets His two great command- 
ments, that we should love God with all our heart, and our 
neighbor as we love ourselves. We have to admit that 
this is not average religion anywhere, and that society 
must always stand in need of a strong Leader and Helper 
if it is to come to righteousness such as this. 

We have to admit regretfully, also, that the Church has 
not always kept this phase of Jesus' teaching to the fore. 
Jesus Himself unquestionably placed it in the very fore 
front, as primary and indispensable for all who would 
follow Him. But the early Church had its attention 
quickly diverted from what Jesus said, to what the Church 
authorities demanded. It is a genuine comfort to remem- 
ber this, for only so is it possible to understand or explain 
why the living gospel of God so sorrowfully languished 
for centuries in the great needy world. For a thousand 
years the common people did not have in their hands the 
gospel records with Jesus' words placing the doing of 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 43 

God's will above all else, but they did have ever in their 
ears, emphasized by the relentless determination of the 
Church to crush all dissent, this paralyzing summons, still 
repeated in the ears of millions : — 

"Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary 
that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except 
everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he 
shall perish everlastingly/' Does this even faintly 
remind us of the message and spirit of Jesus? Can we 
imagine Him adding, after a bewildering series of meta- 
physical subtleties regarding three ^'uncreated and incom- 
prehensible" Persons in the Godhead, '"He therefore that 
will be saved must thus think of the Trinity" ? Nor can 
we conceive of Him who was the Friend of Sinners going 
on to say to His diciples, "It is necessary to everlasting 
salvation that you also believe rightly in the Incarnation." 
He did ask without ceasing, as John so often reminds us, 
that men should believe that God had sent Him, so that 
they should receive His message as truth and recognize 
His mission as divine. But He asked men to think not 
on the mystery of His eternal relation to the Godhead, but 
on their own relation to their brother — whether he had 
aught against them — and to their Father in Heaven, 
whether they were doing His will in love. 

Who can measure the loss and pity of it, that half of 
intellectual Europe thinks of the place of Jesus in the life 
of today as they think of His Church — despotic, auto- 
cratic, suffocating thought, forbidding inquiry, insistent 
above all on submissive conformity to the inherited dogmas 
of the Great Councils of antiquity? Or that the world 
of labor should think of Jesus' influence as the "chloro- 
forming agency" of the bourgeoisie? Is it strange that 
the thinking world has so swung away from Him who 



44 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

came to lead men home to God, when His demands have 
been so piteously misrepresented to them for fifteen hun- 
dred years? The wonder of wonders is that through all 
these centuries the true Church of those who simply heard 
His words and did them has kept on its way unbroken, 
believing in Him with joy and thankfulness, and follow- 
ing after Him till death. And today, in the face of all 
retrogression and apparent decadence of faith, there is 
such an open and waiting field for the preaching of the 
real Jesus, the Saviour of men, as there has never been 
before since the Near East first listened to the message. 

The Jesus of today, like the Jesus of Galilee, is a 
leader in righteousness rather than a leader in correct 
opinions: and just in proportion as men give attention 
to Him, and trust that He was sent of God, and so yield 
themselves to His Mastership, will they find themselves 
walking in paths both of truth and goodness, such as lead 
men by green pastures and still waters. 

But quite apart from inherited beliefs and enthusiasms, 
is it a fact that Jesus really does lead men in these difficult 
ways of righteousness today? Anyone can see the grave 
relaxation of moral restraint in our generation — ^the 
impatience of control, the feverish demand for amusement 
and ever more amusement, the all-prevading appeal to sex, 
and the steady degeneration of the dance and the movies 
and popular literature in obvious response to this appeal. 
The tide of relaxation and self-indulgence runs danger- 
ously swift for the young men and women who have to 
build their house of life in these days disordered by the 
world-wide passions unleashed by war. Is Jesus actually 
more than a fading name, a hollowed memory from which 
the virtue has gone out? Now that there is so much 
selfishness and uncertainty and doubt abroad, does He 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 45 

still bind men's hearts in steadfast allegiance to truth and 
purity and love — in leal loyalty to God. And if He does 
it, how does He do it ? Assuredly one has need to reflect 
deeply before he essays to answer such an appeal with 
confidence. And yet, when all has been said about the 
sinister forces of the world today, the experience of life 
takes clear form and gives decisive answer in some such 
wise as follows. 

In the distributing station of a great power plant there 
IS no visible sign or assurance of the presence of tremen- 
dous forces. An ignorant man might refuse to believe 
that any great powers were gathered there for service. 
And yet behind each silent shining lever lie forces as swift 
and powerful as lightning, ready to leap out in action 
serving the necessities of millions. And here also, in spite 
of its lowly origin, is this divine immeasurable energy, 
flowing from Jesus Christ through society today in streams 
of power, building up men in righteousness — individual, 
social, civic, international — limitless in power as they be- 
lieve in Him, bringing moral leadership to humanity in 
ways as diverse as the infinite variety of human need. 

It springs first and most obviously from His character 
' — His life — His example. We have in the New Testa- 
ment the brief, artless story of His Hfe. Any man of note 
in our day would have a fuller biography than this. And 
yet as we read it attentively we feel its extraordinary 
quality. All idea of its being an invention, like the 
biography of a character in fiction, drops away from us at 
once and of necessity. By every instinct of the soul we 
recognize it, with whatever reservation we may make as to 
details we do not understand, as the true story of a true 
man. If there is such a thing in human life as beauty, or 
dignity, or majesty, we find it here. It lays hold on the 



46 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

very springs of our being, probing our inmost thoughts, 
charming us, inspiring, inviting, filling us with strange 
desires, breeding hunger for better things. All that is 
noble and aspiring in us revives under its strange incite- 
ment and rouses itself to make response. 

Sometimes we may wonder, doubtfully, whether we 
really do make such response, or whether our apparent 
feeling is only in mechanical conformity to the conventions 
of training and tradition. Thank God, we need not 
suspect the genuineness of our spiritual reactions to such 
a story. It draws us irresistibly, because in us is some- 
thing — much baffled and crowded down — that recognizes 
in Him our true estate, the very type of man that we 
would be. If He were here now, being such as He was. 
He would draw us infallibly, as has no man we have ever 
met, in admiration and friendship and imitation. All of 
us have known men whom we have made our heroes, so 
noble they seemed to us, so great in helpfulness, so win- 
some and enviable in character. And here is one whose 
goodness might fairly bring us to our knees in reverence 
' — a man so strong, so fearless, so gentle; so clean and 
true and honorable in the midst of all life's shuffling and 
deceit; so full of sympathy and help for people whom 
others push aside or tread upon ; so radiating trust in God, 
and hope unquenchable. If we had the faintest chance 
to get near such a man in the society of today we would 
seek his company and commit ourselves and our ambitions 
to his influence with eager gladness. A little of his 
friendship and personal attachment would make this often 
sordid world a different place to us. His very aware- 
ness of God in the midst of this blind ruck of things 
would of itself alone draw us to him with all our hearts, 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 47 

in a hope of like victory over the down-drag of material 
circumstances. Just to see him, as a beloved physician, 
bending over the sick in body and bruised in heart, 
making rest and ease and hope bloom again in faces worn 
with pain, would pull mightily at our hearts ; and to know 
that he was able, too, to bring peace of soul to the vicious 
and despairing — would we not follow after such a man 
today, if good fortune made it possible for us to be at his 
side! 

And one thing more ! We do not judge of the wonder 
of Jesus' life, as His first friends did, only by what they 
saw in Him. We have seen His character reproduced in 
other lives swayed by His spirit, so that we can judge how 
His temper works out under innumerable diverse con- 
ditions, often unfavorable — and especially in this wise, 
modern world that we call our own. There is nb doubt 
that such lives vehemently attract us. We may feel 
regrettable limitations in some of them from their train- 
ing or mental environment, but so far as they have lived 
and served in the faith and friendship of Jesus, they have 
had a truly heavenly beauty, and they stir our souls with 
longing, like rare music or a memorable sunset. 

One can see this principle working every day in non- 
Christian lands, where the example of Jesus — however 
imperfectly reproduced^ — is thrown up against a back- 
ground of national religions that lack redeeming power. 
Men who love their country see hope for her in this moral 
power that springs from Him. Mr. Wen Shih Ken, re- 
cent Secretary of State for Chekiang Provinces, gives 
typical expression to this experience. Mr. Wen was re- 
ceived not long ago into the Presbyterian Church, and 
gave this brief statement of the explanation of his action. 



48 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

**My first impulse towards Christianity was re- 
ceived when I was a student in Tientsin. The stu- 
dents of the Medical College of the city were no- 
torious for their immorality. Every effort was 
made to bring about their reform but without success. 
Finally President Liu of the Medical College induced 
some of the students to join a Bible class in the Tient- 
sin Union Church. At first there was no perceptible 
change, but presently surprising results came out. 
Most of the men in the class were baptised. They 
became diligent in study, patient in healing, and en- 
ergetic in preaching the gospel in other schools. The 
evidence furnished in the lives of these students con- 
vinced me that God had real power to make young 
men repent and to purify their hearts. . . . 

'T have decided to become a Christian because I^ 
wish to be like Christian men whom I have observed 
— a man with a pure, strong heart, strong blood, 
true patriotism, and perfect zeal. I believe that 
Christianity is able to save China. I believe the 
Bible is the weapon with which she can work out 
her salvation and face the civilized world." 

No doubt power flows from the life and example of 
Jesus — undying power so long as men are men ; even from 
that brief sketch preserved in the gospels, with the 
appended two thousand years of living commentary and 
illustration. 

The same creative energy for righteousness flows from 
His teaching- — increasingly, as the disappointing centuries 
emphasize its unapproached supremacy. All the steadily 
mounting knowledge and wisdom since His time have not 
brought us more vital, searching words of social and 
spiritual guidance than He once spoke to an out-of-door 
crowd of peasants on a hill-side in Galilee. We have to 
stop and think — and think hard — ^to realize how fruitful 
His teaching as to human relations has become in this last 



THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 49 

century, when men have begun to look intently at His 
words rather than at the authorized theological system of 
the Church. Most men today are ashamed not to seem at 
least familiar with His idea that honor and greatness lie 
rather in serving than in being served^ — although even so 
late as in the eighteenth century we find His Church look- 
ing for the most part in another direction. His repeated 
calls to brotherliness, and mercy, and forgiveness, because 
of our common kinship with God as our Father, echo in 
the ears of all humanity today, as though they belonged to 
all branches of the human family by right of birth: and 
yet their growing power, already immeasurable, flows 
straight from Him who talked of these strange obligations, 
even to narrow fanatic Jews, who were notable haters 
even in that harsh Roman world. 

We remember, too, the calm assurance with which He 
spoke of all that realm of reality beyond what our 
physical senses grasp — of the over-shadowing presence of 
God, of His goodness, and His fatherly care in the midst 
of a world of cruel forces and yet more cruel men. What 
astounding revelation He brought, also, of the possibility 
of moral recovery and restoration for those broken by 
spiritual failure and defeat. Men never guessed that the 
way back to God could lie so broad and open, so invit- 
ing with the promise of joy again, and even love, for 
such as had abused love and poisoned the springs of joy. 
And always He spoke as one who belonged to two worlds 
— to this one, to which he was subject by ties of flesh 
and blood, as are we all: but also to the world of the 
eternal life, already begun here amid earthly days and 
nights, but reaching on timelessly to horizons only known 
to God. 

There is no other teaching like it in all the world — no 



50 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

other influence like its influence. How can it be that He 
retains this primacy in leadership, when our generation, 
standing as it were upon the shoulders of all that have 
gone before, should be able to produce seers and prophets 
such as the weary rank and file of humanity have never 
known before? All sorts of cults and theosophies claim 
our attention, and some of them have much of truth and 
inspiration. Yet when we come to view them closely 
they are at best but reminders, in some respect, of Him 
who spake as never man spake. The world simply does 
not take them seriously when they claim primary authority. 
But the sayings of Jesus radiate the unique majesty of 
authority that belongs only to revelation^ — not to cleverness 
like George Bernard Shaw's, nor to the crude dogmas of 
Mrs. Eddy, nor the transcendental musings of a philoso- 
pher like Emerson, but to him who alone could say with- 
out bathos, "I am the truth." When he says, e. g., to the 
nations of today, "Be ye therefore merciful as your Father 
is merciful," He speaks with profoundity, and authority 
as well, that leave men silent, as if listening to the voice 
of God. 

And so, amid the endless uncertainties through which 
we have to guide our way, we count this as certainty, that 
Jesus and righteousness are inseparably linked. His 
place in modern life is such that He and social righteous- 
ness are simply not to be considered apart. If we are 
thoughtful men we cannot ignore Karl Marx. How much 
less can we ignore — as some affect to do — Him whose life 
and teaching are like a living flame in their power to re- 
buke evil and refine the good. Whether in the solemn 
loneliness of the individual spirit, or the complicated re- 
lationships of classes and nations, He is a leader in 
righteousness—in all the paths that lead through human 
weakness to the will of God. 



Chapter IV 
AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 

There are certain matters of grave import, that men 
endlessly debate. Not such perennial themes as the high 
cost of living or the way of a man with a maid, that one 
may discuss in sheer vacuity of mind. But certain high 
matters of universal and perpetual com:ern, to which the 
human spirit turns in moments of clearest vision and 
deepest self-consciousness. The American Indians used 
to debate these problems around their camp-fires in 
northern forests, just as men do today in discussion groups 
in the universities or under desert stars in Africa. 

They are matters not simply of speculative interest^— 
though men have always loved to speculate about them. 
They are intensely practical — at least as much so as any 
other phase of the stormy struggle for existence. 
Whether my life tends up or down, whether it runs into 
success or failure, depends largely on the answer that I 
find for them. One man loses heart and commits suicide, 
another becomes as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land for thousands, according to his conclusions on these 
themes. We may be quite unconcerned about them for 
years — and then suddenly, at a turn in the road, we are 
met with an insatiable hunger of the soul for light and 
understanding. We may think ourselves quite superior 
to what we consider an old-fashioned concern over theolog- 
ical questions, but we do not really know what is in our 

51 



52 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

hearts until they are shaken by trouble as leaves are 
shaken by the wind. Then we discover new longings and 
new needs. A house built on the sands stands up as 
squarely in fair or foggy weather, and makes as brave a 
show to the world, as one built on rock : but when the clean 
hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and the milk-white 
waves break through and flood the land, then is the testing 
time when one thinks about foundations. And it is these 
foundation realities of human life that men endlessly 
debate, and to which no thoughtful man long holds him- 
self superior. 

Jesus frankly stated that He came to throw light on 
these problems, whose beginning and end reach into the 
unseen. He said, *'I am come a light into the world." 
He said again, with the tense earnestness of one standing 
on the very edge of death, 'To this end have I been born, 
and to this end am I come into the world, that I should 
bear witness unto the truth." Probably He is the only 
man who ever ventured to say, "I know whence I came and 
whither I go." So great a sage as Confucius deliberately 
refused even to speak on these questions. He would not 
pretend to give assurance where he felt he did not know. 
"Not knowing life," he said, "how can we know death?" 
He told men not to seek to inquire whether there were 
gods or spirits. Jesus said, "Ye have not known God, 
but I know Him." He made vast pretensions as to His 
wisdom in the fundamental concerns of the soul. The 
philosophers and theologians of His time he called "blind 
leaders of the blind," but of Himself He said, that the 
man who trusted His word and acted on it built his Hfe 
on rock. These are staggering assumptions for a man 
who never had as much school education as we who read 
this book. What are we to make of them? As practical, 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 53 

open-minded men of the twentieth century, what place 
are we to give to Jesus as an authority in these problems 
as apprehended in the present day? 

Of course there are various attitudes that may be taken 
regarding Him. His first friends, who had known Him 
longest, said that He was crazy. This is what His own 
family thought, so bewildered were they by His assump- 
tion of authority. His neighbors, who had seen Him com- 
ing and going on the streets for years, said, ''He is merely 
one of us villagers, what is the use of paying Him any 
attention? He is only a carpenter. We all know His 
sisters here in town, and as for James and Joseph and 
Simon and Judas, His brothers, they are no better than 
we. Whence hath He this wisdom ?" They were clearly 
jealous of Him and His popularity. Others, among 
whom were the leading citizens and the Church leaders, 
who should have known, said, "The devil is in Him.'' 

As for the public opinion of today, the only uttterly 
foolish and indefensible attitude is to ignore Him, as 
so many do, as though His teachings were negligible for 
men so modern as ourselves. He is disregarded by many 
as completely as though He taught that the earth is flat. 
Some typical writers discuss these topics, which He lived 
and died to make luminous to men, as if Jesus had never 
lived on earth or spoken unforgettable words of wisdom. 
Some of our popular novelists make great show of an- 
alyzing human life in its realistic completeness, trailing 
hero or heroine through a labyrinth of moral and spirit- 
ual perplexities, and yet apparently never having heard 
of that master of men whom none can wholly forget and 
whose words still fall on life like sunlight on a wintry day. 
And other writers and teachers come to conclusions dia- 
metrically opposed to those of Jesus, without a trace of 



54 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

hesitation or misgiving, as though His teachings were Hke 
a text-book out of date, worthless save as a curiosity. 

If Jesus had taken a doctor's degree at Jena, if He 
had studied at the Sorbonne, and if He had the cordial 
commendation of the psychologists and philosophers of 
our leading American universities, we should be compelled 
to listen to what He has to say. But as it is, we are 
forced to recognize not only that He lived in times pre- 
medieval, but that he was not even one of the intelli- 
gentsia of His day — just a workingman in a country vil- 
lage. What place has He as arbiter among learned men 
in this scientific age ? 

II 

He has the place of an unapproached specialist in the 
things of the spirit. Even though He were despised 
and forsaken of all men, we could not attentively face 
Him without perceiving the Master. We can discuss 
Him glibly enough when He is out of sight, but when 
we thoughtfully consider Him as He is presented in the 
gospels, letting mind and heart weigh well His words and 
deeds, we feel — as such a critic as Pierre Loti said — 
that He is "inexplicable and unique." There is no man 
like Him in spiritual quality. Even the callous police- 
runners of His day sensed the fact that never man 
spoke as He did; but it was because never man saw 
the divine realities of human life as He saw them. He 
looked into the face of God as an eagle gazes on the 
sun. The eye of His soul was unduUed with sin — 
stainless He was, where to be stained is to be troubled 
in vision, as we are troubled. You and I could never 
read both human heart and divine thought so unerringly 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 55 

as to say to an outcast with confident authority, Thy 
sins be forgiven thee. But it excites no wonder to 
see Jesus assuming as a matter of course this pre- 
rogative of a flawless spiritual insight and author- 
ity. 

He did not hesitate to claim for Himself the place of 
a specialist, such as no university of today could secure 
for its department of ethics even had it the wealth of 
Rockefeller. We can hardly exaggerate the amazing 
quality of His pretensions as a moral teacher, or the 
angry disgust they created in His time, so extravagant 
and ridiculous did they appear. If an untaught young 
man from Oklahoma were to come East today, announc- 
ing that the men in our leading schools and pulpits were 
blind leaders of the blind, and that the truth as to the 
religious duties of mankind was with him, we should 
hardly do him the honor of being indignant. We should 
pass him by as a brash young man. But Jesus set Him- 
self unhesitatingly above the most venerated authorities 
both of the past and of His own time. "Ye have heard 
that it hath been said . . . but I say unto you . . ." — 
the audacity of those familiar words is the sublime au- 
dacity of one conscious of being the supreme specialist 
in concerns of the soul. ''One greater than Solomon 
is here," He told them — one even "greater than the 
temple," if Jews could conceive of such a thing. "Many 
prophets and kings have desired to hear the things that 
ye hear, and have not heard them" — so He said once to 
His disciples. 

There is nothing ridiculous to us in these assumptions 
— nothing subtly humorous, when seen from our modern 
scientific angle. Abraham Lincoln, in the severest stress 
to which a human spirit groping for wisdom could be 
put, found them superlatively reasonable. We approve 



56 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

them. They are justified by the moral power and glory 
of the speaker. Nothing- less could make them other than 
grotesquely impertinent. He Himself based them on the 
fact that He spoke for God. He did not refer His 
hearers to books or other authorities for His statements. 
He said, "As the Father taught me, I speak these things," 
Either that is bosh, or else it is of awesome and mo- 
mentous consequence. And not only did He claim the 
authority of the specialist. He spoke with a strange 
clairvoyant insight into the realities of the spirit, its 
fundamental needs and capacities, that silences our 
shallower contentions. It imperiously demands assent. 
And something in us answers, and approves. We may 
feel unable or unwilling to obey, but we reverently recog- 
nize a higher wisdom than our own. We may even be 
in a critical and argumentative mood; yet when Jesus 
says, "This is my commandment that ye love one another, 
as I have loved you," we have little disposition to argue. 
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do 
ye even so to them." "He that humbleth himself shall 
be exalted." "Blessed are the pure in heart for they 
shall see Grod." "God is not the God of the dead but 
of the living." Words like these leave us in no mood 
for measuring ourselves with Him. Something in us 
surges up in approval, as though our spirits were made 
to respond to truths like these — truths more searching 
and imperious than those to which we are accustomed in 
books. 

From all over the world today, from soldiers, and 
statesmen, and leaders in finance and industry, one could 
gather fervent approval of the teachings of Jesus, as fur- 
nishing the key to progress in this new century. As in 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 57 

that recent "last word to the people of Great Britain" 
from Earl Grey: — 

"It's Christ's way. Mazzini saw it. We've got 
to give up quarrelling. We've got to come together. 
WeVe got to realize that we are all members of the 
same family. There's nothing that can help human- 
ity, I'm perfectly sure there isn't — perfectly sure— 
except love. Love is the way out, and the way up. 
That's my farewell to the world." 

It is a striking fact that the modern statesmen of the 
English-speaking world, the men of affairs who are 
actually carrying the world burdens as freely chosen 
representatives of the people, fall back upon the author- 
ity of Jesus as the supreme arbiter and guide for our 
troubled civilization. Witness that recent appeal to the 
"Citizens of the British Empire," issued by the premiers 
of the British Commonwealth of Nations, in which they 
say: — 

"The spirit of good-will among men rests on spirit- 
ual forces : the hope of a 'brotherhood of humanity' 
reposes on the deeper spiritual fact of the 'Father- 
hood of God.' In the recognition of the fact of that 
Fatherhood and of the divine purpose for the world, 
which are central to the message of Christianity, we 
shall discover the ultimate foundation for the re- 
construction of an ordered and harmonious life for 
men. . . . The eternal validity and truth of these 
spiritual forces are in fact the one hope for a per- 
manent foundation for world peace." (Signed by 
Lloyd George, Louis Botha, and the premiers of the 
other leading colonies.) 
Our own leading statesmen for fifty years past would 

say the same. 

We need not then apologize for giving to Jesus of 



S8 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

Nazareth as attentive a hearing as to the latest magazine 
writer of our day. If any portion of current literature 
makes us feel that He has quite dropped out of consid- 
eration among practical men of this century, so much 
the worse for current literature. So great a specialist 
was He in the things of God that His appeal to men is 
universal and timeless. Soviet Russia may utterly 
repudiate Him, but Soviet Russia is to Jesus Christ as a 
single crashing breaker on the shore is to the vast silent 
tidal wave swinging endlessly across the oceans. 

Ill 

What is it we most need to know, that we may live 
our life today and tomorrow ardently, faithfully, undis- 
couraged by rebuffs and failures? What but the truth 
about God and his relation to us! If that should link 
up our brief career with His glory, making each unful- 
filled capacity and hunger a prophecy of what shall be 
when His plan for our lives is complete, then even earthly 
life means God and we together, working to an end He 
knows and desires. Such truth would make life great 
indeed. All social efficiency lies behind it. But who 
can assure us of such truth? Not the reviewers, or 
essayists, or even the novelists of today! Jesus alone 
says He can. He said of God, "I know him''^ — said 
that His knowledge was direct, personal, unparalleled 
on earth. "No one knoweth the Father save the Son." 
"The world knew thee not, but I knew thee." In this 
magnificent confidence He won for Himself, first of all, 
the greatest moral victory over life that the history of 
our race has known. It made Him socially efficient — a 
physician, a minister, a saviour, without a parallel. This 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS S9 

huge assertion of His self-consciousness did not wreck 
Him — as it should have done if it were false — it made 
Him the man of all men; it gave Him the name that is 
above every name. It accredits Him to each succeeding 
age as the supreme teacher about God in humanity. So 
we listen with moral intentness to what Jesus has to 
say. None other can do for us what He can do, by 
bringing Father and child together here and now. He 
knew how. He knows how. If we would but attend 
to him, and believe in Him ! 

Again, our world needs inexpressibly to know what 
this God of Jesus thinks of us. Is it likely that He 
who made the universe thinks of us at all? If so, what 
does He think of us, in the few poor years we have be- 
fore we drop out of sight as a leaf drops in the forest? 
Is it possible He cares for our infinitesimal concerns? 
Jesus, so to speak, staked His life on the fact that He 
cares. When we read an essay by the genial John Bur- 
roughs, asserting that God does not care, and that in 
any case we know nothing of Him, then whose authority 
shall we accept, that of John Burroughs or of Jesus? 
Which is the greater specialist in spiritual things? The 
one who belongs to our time, or He who belongs to all 
times? The world will soon forget the denials of the 
naturalist, but when do you suppose men in trouble will 
forget the assurance, "Not a sparrow falleth to the 
ground without your Father. Be of good cheer, ye are 
of more value than many sparrows." Humanity prefers 
the convictions of Jesus to the doubts of the sceptic, not 
because Jesus' teaching is the more comfortable, but be- 
cause in the long run the doubts make for the destruction 
of society, as in Bolshevism, while the faith of Jesus 
makes for the uninterrupted integration of society along 



6o PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

the path of maximum development. Just to be assured 
— as Jesus assures us — that the very first demand God 
makes on men is for their intelHgent love, is to be lifted 
up into a new world of hopes and possibilities and obliga- 
tions. 

Again, our age longs to know whether God hears us 
— can we speak with Him? In the still loneliness of the 
night may one take counsel with a better Friend than 
any we know on earth? Is it possible that here among 
the seductions of earth we may actually have this bracing 
fellowship with One infinitely better than ourselves. 
Prominent scholars today may tell us No. The question 
is at best much debated. But Jesus says to the man or 
woman of today, "Ask and ye shall receive." *'Pray to 
thy Father, and thy Father who seeth in secret shall 
recompense thee." Suppose He had said, as some say 
today, "Ask not in prayer, as the heathen do: for your 
Father knoweth what ye have need of before ye ask 
Him." Instead, He vindicated God's right to be as freely 
kind as the average man, by saying, "If ye then, being 
evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, 
how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give 
good things to them that ask Him?" What a world 
this would be if men trusted the judgment of Jesus at 
this point! If they accepted fearlessly and loyally His 
confidence that God is as helpful as a human father— 
and far more so. 

Jesus does not hesitate to assume the reality of God's 
duties to men. A leading preacher, who belongs in 
thought to an earlier generation, advertised himself the 
other day as preaching on the blasphemy of just this 
assertion. Yet how could Jesus set forth God as 
Father, and leave Him without duties to His sons and 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 6i 

daughters except by special covenant? There is hardly 
a more beautiful and touching sight in our world, than 
that of a mother holding her baby in her arms. The 
little face, still smooth in serene unconsciousness of care, 
gazes up into its mother's face with unwinking stare, 
perfectly safe, perfectly content, knowing nothing of the 
thousand dangers that would beset it were those arms 
to fail, only trusting that the face on which his eyes are 
fixed is his own happy universe of security and promise. 
In all our world there is no other trust so perfect or so 
common. Jesus shared it when He lay on His own 
mother's breast. And wholly knowing this sacrament 
of parental love, He used it to make luminous His gos- 
pel. He called on men everywhere so to think of God, 
and so to treat Him every day, as the One who had made 
them for Himself. Evidently, if one believes in Jesus, 
the sky never can be altogether gray, life never utterly 
forlorn — although here, as everywhere, it is the great 
faith that reaps the great reward. 

It is of the future that men debate most eagerly, as 
to what lies behind death's inexorable curtain. Does it 
hide blank nothing, or a new self-realization pulsing with 
life and promise? At times it has been the mode to dis- 
miss the question with a blase indifferentism, as if man- 
kind had grown superior to hopes bound up with its 
intellectual childhood, and were ashamed to confess to so 
primitive an emotion. We have passed through such 
a time within the memory of us all. But whatever the 
psychologists and essayists have been saying in their 
class-rooms and reviews, the common folk in life's 
trenches, the wives and husbands and fathers and moth- 
ers, the old and lonely and sick and disappointed, the 
unnoticed millions of those who carry on grimly in 



62 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

silence, still share the unquenchable life hunger — still 
cling to the vanished love of those who seem to have 
left them forever. Should any doubt it, let him enter 
a leading bookstore and see the tables loaded with ''psy- 
chic" literature bringing a babel of messages from that 
unknown beyond — by ouija board, by automatic writ- 
ing, by mediums and spirits of every description, telling 
in detail of conditions in the life to come. 

Here again we have to stop resolutely and ask our- 
selves what place is to be reserved for Jesus, as an au- 
thority amid this jostling throng of clairvoyant seers? 
He is manifestly out of vogue, and quite left behind 
by the eager crowd who find Him without pungency or 
flavor in comparison with disembodied spirits who will 
discourse every evening, if duly persuaded, on the most 
minute details of existence on the spiritual plane. But 
when the fad has burnt out, and the crowd has passed on 
to something else, what then will Jesus have to say to 
us and our children ? 

He will still bring the unhesitating assurance of eternal 
life. His argument for it is not in any logical demon- 
stration, but simply in His own self-consciousness and 
His calm insight into the realities of the spirit. He im- 
parts to men His own convictions, by sheer force of 
His own personality. We come into His company and 
under His influence, and presently find ourselves sharing 
His faith and assured of a life indestructible by death. If 
we come under the influence of certain men of our time 
' — Theodore Dreiser, say, and his school of fierce con- 
tenders for an art that knows neither morality nor re- 
straint — faith in a continuing fellowship with God be- 
comes almost instantly not incredible only, but puerile 
and ridiculous. In the same way, moral and intellectual 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 63 

sympathy with Jesus speedily opens our eyes to some- 
thing of what was so real to Him. And with that insight 
we are content : we do not even feel the need of argument; 
we are satisfied, as with knowledge at first hand. 

What Jesus did for men in His day who knew Him 
was to show how unthinkable was fellowship with God in 
terms of this life only. It was a fellowship of love, 
which reached out every day into the eternal. He said 
to those first enthusiastic friends in Galilee, who were 
jeered at and maltreated for His sake, ''Happy are you, 
for great is your reward in heaven." They were to 
look up and on. When He had been preaching to the 
poor and healing the sick through a hot summer day in 
the villages, He slipped out in the cool of the night to 
talk with God, thus holding fast to His brethren and to 
His Heavenly Father, as with either hand. When His 
eyes were just closing to the last dread sights of Calvary 
He said, ^'Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." 
All along the way, from the first days to the last. He 
lived and spoke as one related to two worlds. He was 
bound up in the same bundle of life as the eternal God. 
And any man who closely attends to Jesus Christ today, 
inevitably comes to share this consciousness and convic- 
tion. We find in Him a supreme authority as to the 
mysterious hinterland of earthly life. We rest in His 
assurance that there is a home of the soul with wider 
and more glorious horizons than these hills and prairies 
and oceans that shut us in. Love is stronger than death 
and God's love does not exhaust itself upon us here. 

But if we pay first heed to the voluble spirits, whom 
Sir Conan Doyle so vehemently commends to our 
attention, the whole scene changes. The majesty of the 
glory of God^ — that filled the anticipation of Jesus— 



64 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

fades out miserably into an existence wholly bounded by 
human imagination. No longer does the ineffable wonder 
of God's love and righteousness fill the hearts of the 
children who have found their Father's house. No 
longer is the clear vision of Jesus Christ the joy of men 
and women He has redeemed. All expectation of being 
like Him, when we see Him as He is, drops unhonored 
out of sight. The central fact of that existence is no 
longer a divine enlargement that "hath not entered into the 
heart of man to conceive.'' 

Instead we have an ever-changing composite of the 
views, often most attractive and uplifting, of men and 
women like ourselves — Unitarians, Christian Scientists, 
exponents of New Thought, spiritualists, conventionally 
orthodox, of every shade of religious training and in- 
sight. It is a bewildering labyrinth of conflicting coun- 
sels, always haunted by the admitted presence of "lewd 
spirits of the baser sort," seeking to break in by unworthy 
channels and confuse the truth. If once we part com- 
pany with the serene confidence of the Great Master, and 
refuse to rest in his calm anticipation of God's love for 
ourselves and those we love, then suddenly we fare forth 
into a region of mocking plausibilities, where faith at any 
moment may break down and leave us in a twilight bleak 
and chill. 

Here we recognize the fitness of Jesus as a leader for 
today. He made no effort to describe what transcends 
our limited human understanding. A business man has 
no language in which to make his little boy of three under- 
stand the complexities of financial credit and exchange. 
The little lad is in his father's world and has the same 
brain and potential mental capacity. And yet just for lack 
of a few years of development he cannot faintly compre- 



AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 65 

hend his father's world. There is no language in which it 
may be made plain to him. How infinitely wider is the 
chasm between our physical conditions here on earth and 
the realm of spirit that transcends all earthly experience 
and imagination! Jesus said in simple words that His 
followers should enter into the joy of their Lord; that 
they should be with Him and behold His glory. He 
said also that they should still carry weighty responsi- 
bilities in the service of His Kingdom. 

And so we may be content for those we love who "have 
the misfortune to die." They are in the hands of a 
tenderer care than ours, and there we may leave them, 
without nagging pursuit or cross-examination by mediums 
or ouija-boards, in the strange peace of God. Jesus 
steadies men today by a transcendent hope, built up on 
love, instead of leaving them to ''a puzzled fumbling with 
distracting mysteries." 

^'People don't believe that way now" — so we are told 
confidently in answer to any argument like the above. 
"Jesus is impossible as arbiter in these matters because 
He is quite out of touch with the trend of modern 
thought." There is much truth in this last contention. 
He is out of touch with current thinking. But so He was 
long ago. So He has always been. The explanation of 
it lies all too plainly on the surface. As He said to Peter 
when Peter differed sharply with Him, "You mind not 
the things of God but the things of men." The crushing 
humiliation of his Master by evil men was unthinkable 
to Jesus' friends. It was not unthinkable to redeeming 
love, nor to those in sympathy with God, but self- 
interest and worldly wisdom could make nothing of it. 
And here is the infinite worth of Jesus to society in our 
time. He does not represent "current thought." With 



66 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

an insight divinely clear He *'minds the things of God." 
The stream of eager, excited talk flows on — he stands 
unmoved as the revealer of our Father's will, holy and 
right and good. So we lean on Him as arbiter. We 
take refuge in His insight, fearing our own self-will and 
ignorance. 

Jesus then has this place in the life of today, as of a 
light shining in a dark place. We may talk as much as 
we please about the ''decadence of the church" and the 
"new orthodoxy,'' but it is truer today than ever it was 
that millions would die for Him, intelligently and with- 
out hesitation, through sheer devotion. Whether among 
the Brahmans of New England, or in the African Congo, 
in dazed, unshepherded Russia, or in China or Armenia 
where we have watched so many noble spirits die, among 
all classes and cultures, Roman and Greek and Protestant, 
men and women are at the core of their hearts loyal to 
this Jesus who opens to them a way to God. They rest 
upon His revelation of the Father — they trust His insight 
into eternal truth^ — they believe in Him. 

Dr. J. H. Hutton of Glasgow has given in one of 
his essays a most arresting definition of what it is to be a 
Christian. "A Christian," he says, ''is one who pro- 
poses, God helping him, to go on to embody in his entire 
system of life the insight into things which Jesus Him- 
self lived by." That is what it means to believe in Him. 
To take Him as arbiter! To live by His insight. To 
come gradually, as His friend said, to "have the mind of 
Christ" in all problems personal and social. 



Chapter V 
THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 

We have spoken of Jesus as the bringer of love into the 
social life of today. Imagine infinite love brought into 
close contact with the cold selfishness of such a world 
as ours ! This much is certain, it would be found strug- 
gling mightily with hostile forces. It would find itself 
confronted with a staggering task, as wide as the world. 
We cannot conceive it as quiescent in the face of horrid 
wrong and cruelty. It could not be simply for the com- 
fort and uplift of the few fortunate souls who might 
be willing to receive it. Divine love, suddenly made 
operative in Armenia, would be as stern as death, and 
tender as a mother. Wherever in our world it might pre- 
sent itself, it would be challenged to mortal combat: 
always it would face the need of heroic self-assertion and 
intense activity. 

A life like that of Jesus in the midst of humanity like 
ours must always mark the center of a world conflict. It 
stirs up trouble. He came to bring not peace but a sword. 
Love as a sentiment may be placidly airy and unsub- 
stantial, and Christian people may talk much about it 
on their personal way to heaven. But the true love of 
God on earth, honest and open-eyed, is an aggressive 
energy, always involved of necessity in the greatest of 
all good fights — ^the fight for the Kingdom of God. 

And that is the place of Jesus in the life of today — 



*68 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

He is the heart and soul of the cooperative struggle to 
make God's love rule on earth. The reign of His 
Father's good will in the lives of men He called the 
Kingdom of Heaven. He thought of it as realized here 
on earth, and equally as reaching on into the world to 
come. And that men might have it as a master ambition 
in the very forefront of their living and thinking, He 
left them this prayer for a constant spur and reminder: 

"Thy kingdom come, 

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 

Manifestly it is a fighting prayer, for all true hearts 
and gallant souls who, even at the cost of ease, would 
fain leave the world a better place than they found it. 
And the power and the glory of it as a prayer are in the 
fact that it links up our fitful impulses of benevolence 
with the steadfast love of God, triumphing and undis- 
mayed. The odds are too great for us, the ills of society 
are too deeply lodged, if we are to rely only on our 
own resources and our sharply limited sympathy and 
wisdom. But the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! and 
if Jesus binds up human endeavors with His plans of love, 
even common folk can play an honorable part with 
courage. 

Andrew Carnegie was a genuine lover of his fellow- 
men. He knew the seamy side of life and the hardships 
of the poor, and especially he hated war and all its 
grinding oppression, and its after-brood of miseries and 
hatred. He gave himself and his millions whole-heart- 
edly to the cause of peace and human betterment. Early 
in life he gave complete allegiance to the first extravagant 
claims of Darwinism and the agnostic philosophy of 
Herbert Spencer. He seems thereafter to have shunned 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 69 

all thought and speech of Jesus, as of one found some- 
how at the center of a web of imposture. He was 
satisfied that the human race was steadily developing, and 
that only knowledge was necessary to bring it forward 
to happiness and social stability. He sowed libraries all 
up and down the nation, confident of a harvest of human 
welfare and self-mastery for the common good. Then 
came the appalling out-break of the Great War ! and — as 
his wife says in her pathetic preface to his life story 
^ — from then on his heart was broken. He never rallied 
from the shock. Till then he had kept the spirit and 
even the habits of a young man, in hearty enjoyment of 
all good sport. But his life-long hopes lay in ruins, 
his confident optimism was shattered beyond recovery, 
and he had no inner citadel of refuge. 

Jesus builds men's social hopes and sympathies into the 
Eternal Love and Righteousness, as a lighthouse is dove- 
tailed into the living rock. One may ridicule the pre- 
sumption of such a confidence, but it was the warp and 
woof of the most fruitful life ever lived on earth. Year 
in and year out, Jesus gave Himself to the Kingdom of 
His Father, here on earth among men — undiscouraged by 
crushing odds, undismayed by death. And those few 
years of unquenchable faith have wrought more good for 
humanity than all the wise and prudent programs of cau- 
tious doubters through the centuries. Sanity is said 
to consist in the right interpretation of one's environ- 
ment. Jesus counted His environment to be that of a 
great campaign of endeavor to bring to pass His Father's 
will in human life. He commends that interpretation to 
men of today. He calls all who believe in Him to a great 
constructive programme of love, ignoring the selfish inter- 
ests of race or class. He cheers them with the convic- 



70 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

tion that their Leader is God, that His kingdom is an 
everlasting kingdom, and His dominion endureth through- 
out all generations. We shall not lose our labor if we 
work with Him — ^^we cannot come to old age and the end 
of our campaign of altruism with a broken heart. 

II 

Let us look more closely at Jesus' conception of a 
Kingdom of God among men, which He still puts in the 
mind and heart of those who believe in Him. When He 
first emerged from the long loneliness of the carpenter's 
shop at Nazareth, with the fresh enthusiasm of a young 
man eager to help His people, it is evident that He was a 
man with a message that burned like fire in His bones. 
He was not acting the part of the Messiah, or setting 
an example as the world's perfect man, or founding a new 
religion or a Church, but bringing to the people a mes- 
sage of glad tidings. He came with good news. We 
are left in no doubt as to what form it took. It was 
not the substitutionary atonement, or the doctrine of 
His own majesty as Son of God. It was the "gospel 
of the kingdom." 

Plainly it was of tremendous concern to Him. For 
years He had been brooding over it in silence while He 
went about His work. His heart burned with pity as He 
saw the wretchedness of His people. He saw the dull 
misery of human life on God's good earth. And he 
felt that it was for him — "the carpenter's son"— to bring 
in a new day, to herald a new social order. He called 
it the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven. Every 
countryman of His was thinking about it, as surely as an 
Irishman today is thinking about Home Rule. The na- 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 71 

tional literature of His time, the so-called apocalyptic 
literature of the few generations before His day, centered 
about this national hope. The brief record of the synop- 
tic gospel uses the expression over eighty times. Yet it 
quickly dropped out of sight. We do not find it in the 
writings of Paul or John. It belongs to Jesus Himself. 
But evidently to Him, in those early days in Galilee, it 
was at the very heart of His thought and teaching. 

Probably the most difficult problem of New Testament 
study today is the problem as to just what Jesus meant by 
this message of the Kingdom close at hand. Did He 
mean what all His countrymen meant — the great catas- 
trophe of the end of the age, to bring to a close the long 
drama of human sin and suffering by means of the last 
judgment and the destruction of the wicked, with all the 
dramatic setting of the coming in the clouds and the in- 
gathering of the nations by the angels? Did He believe 
that His own generation was to see the great final deliver- 
ance, wrought by the wrath and power of the Almighty? 
Or was He thinking of a triumph of spiritual forces, creat- 
ing a new order by bringing men into a new relation with 
God and their fellow-men ? Was He looking for a long- 
suffering service of love to win men's hearts, or for a 
sudden victory by the slaughter of all unbelievers until 
— as the Revelation pictures it — blood flowed as deep as 
the horses' bridles? Even till today many good people 
are explicitly hoping for the latter, and sing joyfully 
of the day when He shall come "the lawless to destroy," 
and so crush all opposition and bring our difficult labors 
to an end. 

We are confused by the fact that His own disciples, 
who recorded His words, obviously misunderstood His 
program for the future. It required the keen, far-reach- 



^2 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

ing insight of such a leader as Paul to make plain — even 
to so sympathetic a follower as Peter — the scope and 
meaning of Jesus' plan for the world. They expected 
Him to preach a patriotic and nationalistic gospel- — in 
the language of today, lOO per cent Judaism, Palestine for 
the Jews, "pure Judaism." They did not understand that 
He came to give new meaning to the old submerged 
prophecy, "through thee shall all the peoples of the 
world be blessed"; not by a great catastrophic day of 
revenge and punishment, but by the triumphant working 
out of a spirit like His own, the spirit of "the suffering 
servant,'' in a patient ministry of love. That method can 
achieve nothing save with time, slowly and at the cost of 
endless patience and hope and forbearance — "first the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." 

Yet it is beyond dispute that the thought and life of 
Jesus were keyed to such a program of divine sympathy 
as this, built up about the compassion of a Father, and 
not the insulted majesty of an Oriental sovereign. His 
nearest friends — like so many of His friends since then 
— would have hastened the day of better things by calling 
down fire from heaven on unbelievers. Jesus simply 
said, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." He was 
working by different methods, so indirect and slow, as 
compared with the swift violence of cleansing fires, that 
they seemed forlornly ineffective. 

This is not the place to discuss further this latest prob- 
lem of New Testament interpretation. It is only possible 
to sum up the conclusion in which scholarly Christian 
thought is likely to rest, viz., that Jesus' central and per- 
vading message of good tidings had to do with a new 
spiritual life. His fellow countrymen only too soon found 
out that it was not nationalistic or local or even patriotic. 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 73 

It was not 100 per cent Judaism. It did not satisfy any 
of their fierce longings for the vindication of the law and 
the overthrow of its enemies. It was not orthodox, not 
Jewish at all — not even intelligible to a good Jew. It 
did not even throw on Jehovah the responsibility for vin- 
dicating by one almighty avenging judgment His out- 
raged holiness, but seemed to leave to a pitiable company 
of feeble men and women the silly undertaking of win- 
ning a hateful heathen world through a gospel of love 
and divine forgiveness. 

This seems to be the only conclusion in harmony with 
the broad certainties as to Jesus' life and teaching, that 
stand out unescapable, unmistakable, above all perplexing 
details. Not only the fact that he laid clear stress on the 
spiritual character of the kingdom as one already in the 
midst of them, subject also to the slow development of 
natural growth, working in ways of love and leading to 
moral ends — but above all the fact of his own conscious- 
ness as the Son of God sent to bring back the children 
to the Father. The consciousness of such a mission, so 
wonderful, so divinely tender, infinitely transcending all 
considerations of time or place or nation, dealing with the 
great underlying realities of human need and divine re- 
sponse, leave us no room for any other conclusion that 
does not land us in hopeless confusion. 

Ill 

What then was this vision of hope that drove Jesus 
hither and yon unrestingly among the villages of Galilee, 
preaching a new gospel to the poor? It was the vision 
of a new relation between God and men, that should trans- 
figure life. The very best His people as a whole had 



74 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

dreamed of up till then, was the hope of winning God's 
favor by fearing Him and keeping His law. It made 
them anxious and scrupulous, but it also made them 
proud, self-righteous, and intolerant. Always they had 
before them the kindling thought that they — one small 
Semitic tribe — were the people of privilege, the sons of 
the covenant. There was a contract between them and 
God. They had the sublime inheritance of the law, 
and as they kept the law so would God be good to them 
and confound their enemies. And so their very privilege 
made them selfish, arrogant, useless. All sorts and con- 
ditions of men hated them for their spiritual conceit and 
bigotry. And Jesus was one of them — a Jew ! 

Yet what He saw by faith was this ! A new covenant 
between God and men! Not like the old, that was so 
human and even-handed and that we can understand so 
well — they to keep the law and He to reward them with 
blessing. That had worked out in the sight of all the 
world as a moral failure — it bred pride and legalism, 
while at the same time it was a weary yoke to wear, and 
after all failed of the purpose it had in view. Jesus 
told of a new relation between God and men, divinely 
one-sided and infinitely, overwhelmingly rich in mercy and 
power — yet thrillingly real and true. God was to go the 
whole way in meeting them in their shamed reluctance 
and perplexity. There was no more pretence of an 
evenly balanced exchange of virtue on their part and 
favor on His, than there was when the father ran to 
meet that disreputable hobo figure of his broken-spirited 
son, and put his arms openly around him and kissed him. 
It was a new proposal, not at all like any contract among 
men, but God-like in the glorious abandonment of its 
unpurchased love. Jesus preached good news of a king- 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 75 

dom of love, whose King admitted Himself — nay, de- 
clared Himself — the Father of these common men and 
women of the country villages and city streets. And 
if any one pointed to the stain of sin on them, and the 
vice and avarice wrought into their lives. He only asked 
them to take His forgiveness and cleansing to the full 
limit of their need, and trust and love Him for his over- 
flowing goodness. 

It was a new message indeed ! No wonder men could 
not understand it very well or believe it when they under- 
stood it. And so, in order to make it plain, Jesus lived 
among men to illustrate His Father's purpose, and died 
among men, by the side of the open road, to confirm and 
seal His message. And men have been thinking over it 
ever since, to try to understand it better, and to see 
what manner of kingdom this may be that is altogether 
built on the holy love of a Father for His children, 
and what sort of a social order it involves for hu- 
manity. 

Think what it means to our generation, struggling des- 
perately in the world-wide net-work of selfish interests, 
to catch the vision of this reality. To have the living 
spirit of Jesus wakening in the spirits of men and women 
everywhere faith in such a kingdom on earth. And not 
only faith in it, but passionate devotion to it, like Jesus' 
own. It goes without saying that everyone who believes 
in Jesus, really believes in this kingdom of heaven, here 
and now among men — the real presence of God; the 
operative power of his forgiving, redeeming love as Father 
of his wandering children; and behind all, the almighty 
purpose that His good-will shall triumph in the end, 
both in our individual lives and in the corporate life of 
men. 



76 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 



IV 

A vision of love like this, wide as the world and passing 
no one by, is, of course, a social hope. It cannot be 
concerned only with the saving of individual lives. It 
sweeps away at once the old order of things amid which 
Jesus Himself grew up. Never again could there be 
the old proud aristocracy of godliness. The men to 
whom every one looked up in Jesus' town, the men of 
standing in the church, were men who despised the rabble 
as unclean, hated the Samaritan, and would not so much 
as eat with a Greek or a Roman — their piety was meas- 
ured by their exclusiveness. They were proud of their 
prejudices, and of the gulf that separated them from the 
common world. 

Jesus' new gospel shattered forever all idea of vested 
interests in religion, and left behind in ruin the old 
world of prejudice and caste and ill-will. While He 
lived He was the friend and elder brother of every man 
and woman in need, Jew, Roman, or Samaritan, clean or 
unclean. He said that God was like that, and that in 
His new kingdom every son of man — white or yellow or 
black — was on the same footing of dignity and privilege 
as God's child. The only possible social order, if this 
were true, is one of brotherhood; not only as between 
races, but between the mutually suspicious and hostile 
classes in our industrial society. The only possible basis 
is one of genuine mutual service. 

The visible church has often treated this ideal as if it 
were pure moonshine. But Jesus gave His life for it, 
and wherever His spirit penetrates today, men begin to 
catch a glimpse of this plain, honest fellowship of 



% 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 77 

brotherly men. In the broad warm sunshine of our 
Father's love, the old, bleak selfishness of a society with- 
out God simply cannot exist. Where the gospel of the 
kingdom really penetrates, there begins to be a profound 
intellectual ferment, as men rouse themselves to inquire 
what it means to be their brother's keeper under actually 
prevailing conditions. 

The place of Jesus in the life of today, then, is not 
at all that of a social reformer of the first century, the 
leader of a tiny, communistic group in old Jerusalem. 
As we apprehend Him, He is the spirit of eternal love 
applied to present-day conditions, and working through 
every channel of twentieth-century efficiency. Applied 
love might once have been content with the comfortable 
patronage of distributing coal and blankets to the poor. 
But today, how can an honest man fail to see that the 
principle of Christian brotherhood goes far, far back 
of superficial charities, back as far as the roots of justice 
and sympathy and intelligent comprehension of the other 
man's needs and wants, seeking patiently, by endless study 
and experiment, for the way of redress and economic 
equity in our complicated world? "The kingdom" means 
the love of God applied to the social world — the fact of a 
divinely created brotherhood recognized in face of a pre- 
vailing order of caste and hereditary privilege. To be 
sure, such leadership actually operating in society today 
means difiference of opinion, and sharp antagonism, and 
the everlasting turmoil that attends on divine love in 
human society, like molten iron plunged in cold water. 
But how is an honest man to escape it if he believes in 
Jesus ? 

It is a matter of wonder and humiliation that the so- 
called church of Christ, for long periods of its history, 



78 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

should have been untrue to the spirit of its Master so 
far as to bring measureless hurt to the very name of 
Christian. For example, the churches of the eighteenth 
century in England, both free and established, lived in 
the midst of the most shocking wrongs and abuses, with- 
out lifting voice or hand — as a rule — against the existing 
order. Creeds they had in abundance concerning the 
person and work of Jesus, but when John Wesley and his 
associates came in the spirit of Jesus to preach the simple 
gospel of the kingdom to their poor, some even among 
the clergy ^'sought to put him to death," as men before had 
put to death his Leader. The doctrine of love honestly 
applied to human need filled them with fear and anger, so 
cruelly did it expose their hollow, selfish formalism. But 
Wesley and his followers, seeing a work to do, "flung 
themselves upon the task of saving England.'' And pres- 
ently, under the influence of Jesus, the great organizations 
of sympathetic love for the neglected began to spring 
up everywhere, like violets after a rain. 

One simply cannot come in touch with the spirit of 
Jesus without hearing His call to this brotherly solicitude 
for all men. One may join the church, or become a very 
"prince of the church," and yet live in selfish preoccupa- 
tion. But to believe in Him — just in proportion to one's 
loyalty^ — is to be rooted and grounded in love. As one of 
the earliest friends of Jesus said, "We love, because He 
first loved us." Every day, as one reads the newspapers^ 
he sees — without noticing them — fresh illustrations of 
this principle. It works out the same whether in New 
England or in lands just being reached by the teachings of 
Jesus. 

For example, here is Mr. Shinjiro Omoto of Matsu- 
yama, a Japanese prodigal son. As a young man he was 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 79 

banished from home for his drunkenness and immorality. 
In an attempt to break up some special services that 
Christian missionaries were holding in a theatre, he was 
himself attracted by the message of Jesus, and after 
sundry trying experiences became a Christian. He took 
work in a cotton-spinning factory, in order to earn a 
living, and advanced rapidly to an important position. 
But his heart ached for the thousands of young girls em- 
ployed in factory life and compelled to live under dis- 
astrous conditions morally. It was not his business to 
interfere in the matter, but like his Master, he saw these 
friendless waifs distressed and scattered like lost sheep. 
He started what he called a "Sympathy Society," a sort 
of night-school, where the girls could have wholesome 
recreation, and add some common studies to their play. 
This was soon over-crowded. Mr. Omoto saw that 
little could be accomplished so long as the girls were com- 
pelled to herd together in the common lodging houses. 
Some sort of a Christian home was needed: and this he 
started, in a humble way, by the aid of American mission- 
aries. Five hundred girls enjoyed the shelter of this 
home in its first five years, and so successful and appealing 
was this humble experiment that it attracted wide atten- 
tion and has borne fruit in various ways in other factory 
centers. Mr. Ishii's noble orphanage at Okayama grew 
from a similar seed of Christian sympathy. 

Such illustrations of course could be multiplied without 
end : and while the tale was being told, new activities of 
living helpfulness would spring up over night, as freshly 
awakened souls took up their birthright as sons and 
daughters of God, obedient to the leadership of Jesus 
Christ. But the point to be noted is, that for this living 
fountain of social renewal our generation is directly in- 



8o PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

debted to the gospel of the Kingdom held up by Jesus 
Christ. It is, one might almost say, far more a gospel 
for the twentieth century than for the first, because better 
understood, more widely proclaimed, and more efficiently 
applied. It has the advantage of a thousand years of ex- 
perimentation. It works divinely well. Is there anything 
else in the whole tormented field of the war more reassur- 
ing, more shiningly victorious over human weakness, than 
the Quaker ministry to the hungry children of Germany ? 
Unadvertised, silently and all but secretly, they have been 
feeding 700,000 children daily, in ^ as many as 5,000 
feeding centers. And the deed, so in keeping with their 
history, has sprung directly from their vital contact with 
Him who said, '^Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of 
these least, ye have done it unto me.'" 

This is the fact to be noted, that the place of Jesus 
in the life of today is one of tremendous and immeasur- 
able consequence for good-will among men, and for ap- 
plied sympathy in forms as various as human needs. 
Our world is seething with intellectual activities, and eco- 
nomic and social theorists and reformers fill our ears with 
their ever-new proposals and appeals. Many of us are too 
timid to mention the name of Jesus in such scholarly 
company, lest we be smiled at as antiquated or conven- 
tional. And yet it is the spirit of Jesus that is actually in- 
corporating millions of men and women in a kingdom of 
world-wide fellowship of love and service that has its 
assurance of permanence and success in the almighty 
will of God. Their unquenchable activity is the witness 
to the continuing kingdom of God on earth. Full in the 
face of human distrust and bitterness and opposition is 
this holy, loving, redeeming will at work to bring about a 
brotherhood of men rooted in the supreme wonder of the 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 8i 

Fatherhood of God. As Benjamin Kidd has recently said, 
"Jesus is the center of the greatest power system which 
has arisen in history/' Even in university circles one 
does not need to patronize Him, or mention His name with 
apology. One might as well apologize for any other mys- 
terious primal force, like that of atomic energy. 

Thousands of happy people were leaving last week for 
over-seas. But among the crowd on the dock at San 
Francisco was a little group of six young people on a 
peculiar errand. They were ordinary Salvation Army 
soldiers, leaving home for a term of seven years' service 
in leper settlements in the Far East. Perhaps they would 
return, perhaps not: but it was a cheery, hopeful party. 
Possibly money could have bought so lonely and repul- 
sive a service, possibly not. But it was not money they 
"were thinking of. It was the love of Christ that warmed 
their hearts with pity for outcast, suffering brothers and 
sisters across the sea. Class-room and arm-chair re- 
formers of society are easy to find. But those who ac- 
tually go down into the pit for a lifetime, as' did Gen. 
and Mrs. Booth with the children of despair and misery, 
are, so to speak, purchased with life-blood. 

And here is this peculiar yet inseparable quality about 
the spirit of Jesus, that underlies the whole structure 
of His kingdom today. The "friendly community" of 
well-disposed and mutually helpful people is not the whole 
story. Good-nature and generous sympathy and tolerance 
are not the only forces that are demanded. Very much 
of our thinking and writing about the pleasant theme of 
the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, the 
leadership of Jesus and the universal duty of social ser- 
vice, leaves out of sight one necessary element that Jesus 
never lost from sight. One word is missing— -the unwel- 



83 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

come word "cost." Every day of Jesus' life was saturated 
with the thought of God, and of His fatherly love, so 
willing to sacrifice to prevail over human sin. Here 
is where the urgency and the solemnity, the mystery and 
the power, of the teaching of Jesus about the longed-for 
Kingdom of God, find their explanation. He knew what 
the Fatherhood of God costs — what the Brotherhood of 
Man costs — what the actual saving of a lost man or 
woman costs. His efifort to reaHze it in His own ministry 
made Him, for all His attractive quality, a man de- 
spised and forsaken, acquainted well with grief. 

In the race for comfort and wealth and ease today, 
what is it worth to have a Leader like this, just next us 
in spiritual contact, to hold us true to such a kingdom? 
To link us up with the purposes of God, while we must 
yet live shoulder to shoulder with avarice and all selfish 
lusts? That is the place Jesus fills in this year of the 
twentieth century — of one who does in fact make men 
and women a part of the army of love, of the working 
Kingdom of God. He cuts a man clean away from dis- 
loyalty and indecision, as with a sharp sword. His call 
leaves no room for any lingering insubordination at any 
point — ^as by tolerating secretly the indecency and dis- 
honor of popular up-to-date novels and plays and social 
standards. Not because those who believe in Him set up 
to be better than their neighbors, but because they know 
themselves to be the children of a holy God. One purer 
than their mothers, truer than their fathers, the very 
heart and source of worth and goodness. They are to be 
unhesitant as Cromwell's Ironsides, as soldiers of a great 
purpose — a purpose oft assailed, perhaps often shaken, 
but never to be laid down till dishonor is to be preferred 
to death. 



THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 83 

So, even though Jesus is still despised and rejected of 
men, we seek Him out today, only fearing lest any cool 
altruistic purpose should come between Him and our 
heart's devotion. 



Chapter VI 
JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 

There is one reason above others why our modern 
world will not let Jesus go : because in Him men actually 
find an outstretched hand of help. They may not be 
able to argue very well about the psychology of religion, 
but they will cling to the hand that raised them up out of 
the shame and darkness of moral defeat. A group of 
men sitting pleasantly about the table over the coffee and 
cigars will discuss the problem of racial prejudice with 
cool, academic reserve. But if one of them were lying 
on a heap of stones by the roadside, beaten up by thugs 
and thrown out of a car to die, and a friendly Chinaman 
were to raise him up, and bring, him bewildered back to 
consciousness, and bind up his wounds and carry him to a 
place of safety and rest and nursing — all at the risk of 
his life there in the lonely night — he will have had at 
least one experience of social solidarity, of which he will 
never be able to speak without deep feeling. And there 
are millions of common people who feel just in this 
intense, unreasoning way about the spiritual leader who 
is still despised and rejected of men. As Pascal says, 
*'the heart has its reasons of which the world knows 
nothing." They cannot discuss critical questions about 
documents, but they have felt the healing touch of divine 
pity and out of weakness have been made strong. What 
they feel to be God's help has reached them in an emer- 

84 



JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 85 

gency through their faith in Jesus ; and always afterwards 
in life they feel toward Jesus as one must feel toward a 
friend who has show him unforgetable kindness. There 
are all sorts of kindnesses, but this is of supreme excel- 
lence in that it lifts one up toward God. For sensitive 
souls there is the thrill of love in it, as well as power, and 
it binds their spirits in loyalty to him ever after, so long 
as they have any being. Learned men may discuss in the 
religious press whether or not the church is losing its 
hold on modern society : and often the reason is obvious 
enough when it is losing hold. But does any one sup- 
pose that common folk throughout the world are going to 
let go of Jesus if he actually brings them to see and 
share God's life, in spite of their sin? 

Browning, in his "Epitaph of One of Nero's Slaves," 
puts in his mouth the familiar words : 

"I was some time in being burned : 
But at the close a hand came through 
The fire above my head, and drew 
My soul to Christ, whom now I see." 

"A hand came through." So Jesus dawns even on the 
sophisticated life of our day. When the eternal mystery 
breaks through from God to human eyes, it is as a hand 
stretched out to help. When the ultimate, unknown 
power beyond the universe would make Himself better 
known to men, it is in this winsome form of one who 
came to do what a mighty friend might do for human 
life. Not at all as once in the long past when "out of the 
fire and blackness and tempest came the voice of words, 
which they that heard entreated that no word should be 
spoken to them"^ — when even Moses "did exceedingly fear 
and quake/' 



86 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

Thank God! those days of dull understanding have 
passed away. For long ages men in every land had 
"stretched lame hands of faith, and groped, and gathered 
dust and chaff/' But when the glory of God dawned 
like the morning star on human life, men saw it in the 
face of one meek and lowly in heart, a man himself made 
perfect by suffering, that he might be the Good Physician 
for all time, a man who called himself the Good Shepherd 
of the straying sheep, and who went deep into the wilder- 
ness and the mountains to find and bring home such as 
had lost their way. 

"And none of the ransomed ever knew, 

How deep were the waters crossed. 

Nor how dark was the night our Lord went through, 

Ere he found the sheep that was lost." 

The simple words touch the profoundest depths of human 
consciousness. Men interpret God through that undaunted 
Shepherd, and know that He is very good. 

We shall best understand what place remains for Jesus 
in the life of today as the revealed sympathy of God, if 
we look inquiringly at His behavior when He lived for 
a little while in the sight of men. To be sure, we are 
familiar with it all, but one never refuses another look at 
a beautiful painting, to say nothing of a beautiful life. 
And almost at once, in the first chapter of the story, we see 
Him in His most characteristic gesture and action. A 
loathsome and disgusting figure thrust itself upon His 
notice — a leper banished from the common haunts of men. 
He did not ask for money, but for what no money could 
buy — a clean body, at rest from pain. What did Jesus 
do? He did not do what you or I would have done, or 
what any other man of His race would have down to 



JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 87 

this lonely wretch, unclean and dangerous. By Jewish 
law and custom the leper was cut off from common life, 
and from any close approach to his fellows. Cursing 
and cruelty were his life-long portion. But Jesus 
stretched out His hand and touched him — as a brother 
might^ — as God might — lingeringly and lovingly, unafraid, 
as one sent to meet him there and draw him out of hell. 
Surely, the leper saw God looking out through Jesus' 
face! 

Would that we might have seen and read what was in 
Jesus' eyes, and understood, so that life-long thereafter we 
might rest on such a God as that, loving Him heart and 
soul and mind and strength for His sympathy and under- 
standing and compassion! But if we choose, we can 
meet men by the score today, commonplace figures on the 
street, who will say that Jesus has drawn them out of a 
worse hell than leprosy, and that they have seen and felt 
the pity and power of God through Him. The same hand 
has lifted them up. We need to remember this when 
men tell us that our generation has outgrown the need 
of Jesus. 

Then, later on, we have the picture of Jesus saving a 
drowning man. His friend Peter, having leaped over- 
board from the shelter of the boat, and feeling for the 
first time the full force of the wind and the driven spray 
like hail, was just sinking below the frothing waves. 
Jesus caught him in a grip made vise-like by years of 
work with plane and saw, and drew him back to life, 
Peter's faith failed him just at the crisis, as it did at a 
deadlier crisis, later on. He miscalculated his courage, 
and was going under. And just at the moment of terror 
— terror of death or worse — a great pitying love reached 
out to him by a man's hand and saved him. The hand 



88 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

was that of Jesus^ — ^but the understanding sympathy, 
quick to help, was that of the Father of our spirits, in 
whom, unseen, we live and move and have our being. 
If such a hand could reach to a tempted young fellow in 
our city streets today, there would be a place in the 
twentieth century for Jesus still, -would there not ! 

And then again we have the scene where Jesus stood 
looking down at the bed where lay the little daughter of 
the home, dead. Father and mother stood behind Him, 
awed and silent, and His three friends helpless to aid of 
comfort. But He in whom the power of God was, 
reached down and took her hand in His, calling her, and 
watched the tide of life flow back, and when her hand was 
warm again. He lifted her up, and left her to her parents. 

It must have been an inexpressible joy to him to do 
this thing, because it summed up visibly the very spirit 
of His mission. When God reaches through to touch 
men with fatherly sympathy, it is that they may have 
life and have it abundantly. So Jesus Himself said. A 
few years more or less under the sun is nothing by com- 
parison, and yet it is a stunning marvel to see the body's 
lease of life lengthened out unexpectedly even by a hand's 
breadth. But just as the soul is greater than the body, so 
it is a greater thing by far to put within the soul the 
conscious power of an endless life, or to cleanse and 
vivify and widen its capacities here on earth. And this 
is what Jesus obviously was doing for His friends and 
acquaintances when He was with them. He stretched 
out a hand of beckoning invitation to a couple of local 
fishermen whom he knew — James and John- — and led them 
on and up until, instead of being village fish-pedlars, 
they became ''friends of all the world," lifting men up 
toward God. He saw that fearsome madman among the 



JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 89 

tombs, and scattered his dreadful night, and sent him 
home in joy to tell what Jesus had done for him. He 
gathered little children in His arms to bless them, and 
when He died 'Vith out-stretched arms in mortal woe,'' 
they were flung out in sheer love as if to embrace the 
world. 

You could scarcely find an artist in our generation who 
would depict Jesus as a philosopher, with hands muffled 
in His robe. We reverence Socrates in such an attitude, 
but it would be curiously impossible and incongruous for 
Jesus. His hands are free and busy with service. Simply 
because He was not a philosopher but a Saviour, and the 
most untutored mind recognizes Him as such. He spoke 
the universal language of help and love, and its power 
and attraction are timeless. The Russian Soviets could 
no more cast Him out of men's hearts than they could 
forbid men the sunlight. It warms and cheers. So does 
the glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus. His 
voice may be drowned out for a little while, but presently 
it will be heard again, like the silenced chimes in Belgium, 
rippling now with joy. 

II 

But has Jesus lived on into our twentieth century, and 
is He as truly as ever He was an outstretched hand of 
heavenly love for needy men? Let any one answer, any- 
where under heaven, from Oxford to Peking, who has 
sincerely turned to Him in faith that He would redeem, 
even from life's dregs. It is not fair to ask those who 
hold the coolly critical attitude of unbelief, because in the 
nature of the case the spiritual influence of Jesus can 
ionly be imparted by that contact of spirit which faith 



90 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY 

affords. No more today than once in His own home 
town can He do any mighty works for those whose minds 
are closed against Him. But where men reach out to 
Him in the audacity of need, that hand responds. This 
is not the assertion of the church, it is the witness of 
human experience the world over. 

This is what Francis Thompson, the poet, meant when 
he spoke of Christ walking not now on Galilee but on the 
River Thames. Thompson was one who knew by ex- 
perience. He had almost gone under : he had drunk to the 
dregs the cup of sin and poverty and loneliness in London. 
To use his own words : 

"In the rash lustihood of my young powers, 

I shook the pillaring hours 
And pulled my life upon me : grimed with smears 
I stand amid the dust of mounded years — 
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. 
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.'' 

Yet it was he who wrote later : 

'^Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter 
Cry ! clinging heaven by the hems. 
And lo ! Christ, walking on the water, 
Not of Gennesareth but Thames !" 



THE END 



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